Right Place, Right Time! Dynamizing Topological Graphs for Embodied Navigation

Abstract: Embodied Navigation tasks often involve constructing topological graphs of a scene during exploration to facilitate high-level planning and decision-making for execution in continuous environments. Prior literature makes the assumption of static graphs with stationary targets, which does not hold in many real-world environments with moving objects. To address this, we present a novel formulation generalizing navigation to dynamic environments by introducing structured object transitions to dynamize static topological graphs called Object Transition Graphs (OTGs). OTGs simulate portable targets following structured routes inspired by human habits. We apply this technique to Matterport3D (MP3D), a popular simulator for evaluating embodied tasks. On these dynamized OTGs, we establish a navigation benchmark by evaluating Oracle-based, Reinforcement Learning, and LLM-based approaches on a multi-object finding task. Further, we quantify agent adaptability, and make key inferences such as agents employing learned decision-making strategies generalize better than those relying on privileged oracle knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to introduce structured temporal dynamism on topological graphs for studying generalist embodied navigation policies. The code and dataset for our OTGs will be made publicly available to foster research on embodied navigation in dynamic scenes.