IMPRINT: Image-Conditioned Query Enrichment for Long-Tail Object Goal Navigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25106v1
• Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:09:32 GMT
• Title: IMPRINT: Image-Conditioned Query Enrichment for Long-Tail Object Goal Navigation
• Abstract summary: Embodied AI increasingly relies on queryable semantic maps built from pre-trained vision-language models to enable zero-shot Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav)<n>We introduce IMPRINT, a zero-shot framework that enriches textual object queries with web-sourced images to improve grounding in queryable maps.<n>We present HSSD-rare, a new ObjectNav benchmark built on Habitat Synthetic Scenes featuring semantically specific subcategories.
• Score: 13.183204553352802
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Embodied AI increasingly relies on queryable semantic maps built from pre-trained vision-language models to enable zero-shot Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav). However, existing approaches typically depend on text-only queries, which become less reliable as semantic specificity increases toward fine-grained object categories. We introduce IMPRINT, a zero-shot plug-and-play framework that enriches textual object queries with web-sourced images to improve grounding in queryable maps. Retrieved images are encoded using a vision-language model, matched against the semantic map to produce similarity maps, and aggregated to yield context-aware localization. Notably, this requires no training or modification of the underlying navigation policy. To explicitly evaluate long-tail behavior, we present HSSD-rare, a new ObjectNav benchmark built on Habitat Synthetic Scenes and featuring semantically specific subcategories. Across both OVON and HSSD-rare, image-conditioned queries consistently improve object grounding and yield end-to-end navigation gains. Further analysis reveals that translating localization gains to navigation performance depends critically on downstream detection quality, highlighting a key systems bottleneck in long-tail embodied navigation.

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