LERR-Nav: Learning to Coordinate Exploration, Recovery, and Reminiscing for Object Navigation

Abstract

Object Navigation in unseen environments remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, as it requires agents to generalize visual and spatial reasoning to novel layouts. While recent advances in large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) have enhanced semantic mapping, spatial memory, and waypoint selecting for navigation, successful navigation requires more than selecting the next promising waypoint. A robot must also recognize stalled progress, escape unproductive behaviors, and revisit overlooked target cues. Addressing these challenges requires both specialized navigation strategies and a high-level policy that coordinates their execution. Motivated by the analysis of failed navigation episodes, we propose LERR-Nav, an object navigation framework that coordinates exploration, recovery, and reminiscing through a learned high-level policy. The framework comprises four complementary navigation strategies: value-function-guided exploration, LLM-guided exploration, recovery from stalled or repetitive behavior, and memory-guided reminiscing. To support history-aware coordination, we maintain the execution memory that preserves textual summaries of all strategy executions alongside a sliding window of map sequences. To learn the coordination policy, we initialize a high-level vision-language agent from Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and train it through a two-stage curriculum. The first stage uses map-centric supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to establish spatial grounding. The second stage performs SFT on variable-length navigation segments to learn which navigation strategy to invoke next based on current maps and the hybrid execution memory. Experiments on HM3D and MP3D demonstrate state-of-the-art navigation performance, while ablation studies validate the contributions of individual components.