Exploitation-Guided Exploration for Semantic Embodied Navigation

In the recent progress in embodied navigation, modular policies have emerged as a de facto framework. However, there is more to compositionality beyond the decomposition of the learning load into modular components. In this work, we investigate a principled way to syntactically combine these components. Particularly, we propose Exploitation-Guided Exploration (XGX) where separate modules for exploration and exploitation come together in a novel and intuitive manner. We configure the exploitation module to take over in the deterministic final steps of navigation i.e when the goal becomes visible. Crucially, an exploitation module teacher-forces the exploration module and continues driving an overridden policy optimization. XGX with effective decomposition and novel guidance, improves the state-of-the-art performance on the challenging object navigation task from 70% to 73%. Finally, we show sim-to-real transfer to robot hardware and XGX performs over two-fold better than the best baseline from simulation benchmarking.Project page: XGXvisnav.github.io