Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation aims to enable agents to autonomously navigate to sound sources in unknown 3D environments using auditory cues. While current AVN methods excel on in-distribution sound sources, they exhibit poor cross-source generalization: navigation success rates plummet and search paths become excessively long when agents encounter unheard sounds or unseen environments. This limitation stems from the lack of explicit alignment mechanisms between auditory signals and corresponding visual regions. Policies tend to memorize spurious \enquote{acoustic fingerprint-scenario} correlations during training, leading to blind exploration when exposed to novel sound sources. To address this, we propose the AGVP framework, which transforms sound from policy-memorable acoustic fingerprint cues into spatial guidance. The framework first extracts global auditory context via audio self-attention, then uses this context as queries to guide visual feature attention, highlighting sound-source-related regions at the feature level. Subsequent temporal modeling and policy optimization are then performed. This design, centered on interpretable cross-modal alignment and region reweighting, reduces dependency on specific acoustic fingerprints. Experimental results demonstrate that AGVP improves both navigation efficiency and robustness while achieving superior cross-scenario generalization on previously unheard sounds.

Audio-visual navigation represents a significant area of research in which intelligent agents utilize egocentric visual and auditory perceptions to identify audio targets. Conventional navigation methodologies typically adopt a staged modular design, which involves first executing feature fusion, then utilizing Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) modules for sequence modeling, and finally making decisions through reinforcement learning. While this modular approach has demonstrated effectiveness, it may also lead to redundant information processing and inconsistencies in information transmission between the various modules during the feature fusion and GRU sequence modeling phases. This paper presents IRCAM-AVN (Iterative Residual Cross-Attention Mechanism for Audiovisual Navigation), an end-to-end framework that integrates multimodal information fusion and sequence modeling within a unified IRCAM module, thereby replacing the traditional separate components for fusion and GRU. This innovative mechanism employs a multi-level residual design that concatenates initial multimodal sequences with processed information sequences. This methodological shift progressively optimizes the feature extraction process while reducing model bias and enhancing the model's stability and generalization capabilities. Empirical results indicate that intelligent agents employing the iterative residual cross-attention mechanism exhibit superior navigation performance.

Intelligent agents often require collaborative strategies to achieve complex tasks beyond individual capabilities in real-world scenarios. While existing audio-visual navigation (AVN) research mainly focuses on single-agent systems, their limitations emerge in dynamic 3D environments where rapid multi-agent coordination is critical, especially for time-sensitive applications like emergency response. This paper introduces MASTAVN (Multi-Agent Scalable Transformer Audio-Visual Navigation), a scalable framework enabling two agents to collaboratively localize and navigate toward an audio target in shared 3D environments. By integrating cross-agent communication protocols and joint audio-visual fusion mechanisms, MASTAVN enhances spatial reasoning and temporal synchronization. Through rigorous evaluation in photorealistic 3D simulators (Replica and Matterport3D), MASTAVN achieves significant reductions in task completion time and notable improvements in navigation success rates compared to single-agent and non-collaborative baselines. This highlights the essential role of spatiotemporal coordination in multi-agent systems. Our findings validate MASTAVN's effectiveness in time-sensitive emergency scenarios and establish a paradigm for advancing scalable multi-agent embodied intelligence in complex 3D environments.

In audio-visual navigation (A VN) tasks, an embodied agent must autonomously localize a sound source in unknown and complex 3D environments based on audio-visual signals. Existing methods often rely on static modality fusion strategies and neglect the spatial cues embedded in stereo audio, leading to performance degradation in cluttered or occluded scenes. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning-based AVN framework with two key innovations: (1) a Stereo-Aware Attention Module (SAM), which learns and exploits the spatial disparity between left and right audio channels to enhance directional sound perception; and (2) an Audio-Guided Dynamic Fusion Module (AGDF), which dynamically adjusts the fusion ratio between visual and auditory features based on audio cues, thereby improving robustness to environmental changes. Extensive experiments are conducted on two realistic 3D scene datasets, Replica and Matterport3D, demonstrating that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of navigation success rate and path efficiency. Notably, our model achieves over 40% improvement under audio-only conditions compared to the best-performing baselines.

Sim2real transfer has received increasing attention lately due to the success of learning robotic tasks in simulation end-to-end. While there has been a lot of progress in transferring vision-based navigation policies, the existing sim2real strategy for audio-visual navigation performs data augmentation empirically without measuring the acoustic gap. The sound differs from light in that it spans across much wider frequencies and thus requires a different solution for sim2real. We propose the first treatment of sim2real for audio-visual navigation by disentangling it into acoustic field prediction (AFP) and waypoint navigation. We first validate our design choice in the SoundSpaces simulator and show improvement on the Continuous AudioGoal navigation benchmark. We then collect real-world data to measure the spectral difference between the simulation and the real world by training AFP models that only take a specific frequency subband as input. We further propose a frequency-adaptive strategy that intelligently selects the best frequency band for prediction based on both the measured spectral difference and the energy distribution of the received audio, which improves the performance on the real data. Lastly, we build a real robot platform and show that the transferred policy can successfully navigate to sounding objects. This work demonstrates the potential of building intelligent agents that can see, hear, and act entirely from simulation, and transferring them to the real world.

Developing embodied agents in simulation has been a key research topic in recent years. Exciting new tasks, algorithms, and benchmarks have been developed in various simulators. However, most of them assume deaf agents in silent environments, while we humans perceive the world with multiple senses. We introduce Sonicverse, a multisensory simulation platform with integrated audio-visual simulation for training household agents that can both see and hear. Sonicverse models realistic continuous audio rendering in 3D environments in real-time. Together with a new audio-visual VR interface that allows humans to interact with agents with audio, Sonicverse enables a series of embodied AI tasks that need audio-visual perception. For semantic audio-visual navigation in particular, we also propose a new multi-task learning model that achieves state-of-the-art performance. In addition, we demonstrate Sonicverse's realism via sim-to-real transfer, which has not been achieved by other simulators: an agent trained in Sonicverse can successfully perform audio-visual navigation in real-world environments. Sonicverse is available at: https://github.com/StanfordVL/Sonicverse.

Generalisation to unseen contexts remains a challenge for embodied navigation agents. In the context of semantic audio-visual navigation (SAVi) tasks, the notion of generalisation should include both generalising to unseen indoor visual scenes as well as generalising to unheard sounding objects. However, previous SAVi task definitions do not include evaluation conditions on truly novel sounding objects, resorting instead to evaluating agents on unheard sound clips of known objects; meanwhile, previous SAVi methods do not include explicit mechanisms for incorporating domain knowledge about object and region semantics. These weaknesses limit the development and assessment of models' abilities to generalise their learned experience. In this work, we introduce the use of knowledge-driven scene priors in the semantic audio-visual embodied navigation task: we combine semantic information from our novel knowledge graph that encodes object-region relations, spatial knowledge from dual Graph Encoder Networks, and background knowledge from a series of pre-training tasks -- all within a reinforcement learning framework for audio-visual navigation. We also define a new audio-visual navigation sub-task, where agents are evaluated on novel sounding objects, as opposed to unheard clips of known objects. We show improvements over strong baselines in generalisation to unseen regions and novel sounding objects, within the Habitat-Matterport3D simulation environment, under the SoundSpaces task.