Learning Embeddings that Capture Spatial Semantics for Indoor Navigation

June 2026

Learning Embeddings that Capture Spatial Semantics for Indoor Navigation

Authors:

Vidhi Jain, Prakhar Agarwal, Shishir Patil, and Katia Sycara

Abstract:

Incorporating domain-specific priors in search and navigation tasks has shown promising results in improving generalization and sample complexity over end-to-end trained policies. In this work, we study how object embeddings that capture spatial semantic priors can guide search and navigation tasks in a structured environment. We know that humans can search for an object like a book, or a plate in an unseen house, based on the spatial semantics of bigger objects detected. For example, a book is likely to be on a bookshelf or a table, whereas a plate is likely to be in a cupboard or dishwasher. We propose a method to incorporate such spatial semantic awareness in robots by leveraging pre-trained language models and multi-relational knowledge bases as object embeddings. We demonstrate using these object embeddings to search a query object in an unseen indoor environment. We measure the performance of these embeddings in an indoor simulator (AI2Thor). We further evaluate different pre-trained embedding onSuccess Rate(SR) and success weighted by Path Length(SPL).

Notes:

@workshop{Jain-2026-128859,
author = {Vidhi Jain And Prakhar Agarwal And Shishir Patil And Katia Sycara},
title = {Learning Embeddings that Capture Spatial Semantics for Indoor Navigation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of NeurIPS '21 Workshop on Object Representations for Learning and Reasoning},
year = {2026},
month = {June},
}
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