AERR-Nav: Adaptive Exploration-Recovery-
Reminiscing Strategy for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

1Hong Kong Polytechnic University
2Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
3Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

*Corresponding author

Video Demo Presentation

Abstract

Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) in unknown multi-floor environments presents a significant challenge. Recent methods, mostly based on semantic value greedy waypoint selection, spatial topology-enhanced memory, and Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a decision-making framework, have led to improvements. However, these architectures struggle to balance exploration and exploitation for ZSON when encountering unseen environments, especially in multi-floor settings, such as robots getting stuck at narrow intersections, endlessly wandering, or failing to find stair entrances. To overcome these challenges, we propose AERR-Nav, a Zero-Shot Object Navigation framework that dynamically adjusts its state based on the robot's environment. Specifically, AERR-Nav has the following two key advantages: (1) An Adaptive Exploration-Recovery-Reminiscing Strategy, enables robots to dynamically transition between three states, facilitating specialized responses to diverse navigation scenarios. (2) An Adaptive Exploration State featuring Fast and Slow-Thinking modes helps robots better balance exploration, exploitation, and higher-level reasoning based on evolving environmental information. Extensive experiments on the HM3D and MP3D benchmarks demonstrate that our AERR-Nav achieves state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot methods. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the efficacy of our proposed strategy and modules.

AERR-Nav Framework

AERR-Nav Framework

Fig.1: AERR-Nav pipeline

BibTeX

@misc{huang2026aerr-nav,
      title={AERR-Nav: Adaptive Exploration-Recovery-Reminiscing Strategy for Zero-Shot Object Navigation}, 
      author={Jingzhi Huang and Junkai Huang and Haoyang Yang and Haoang Li and Yi Wang},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2603.17712},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17712}, 
}