REST transforms the zero-shot object-navigation problem from simple waypoint selection to a tree-of-paths reasoning process.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
REST: Receding Horizon Explorative Steiner Tree for Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation
arXiv · 2603.18624
The Takeaway
By representing potential navigation options as a tree of paths rather than isolated destinations, LLMs can reason about en-route information gain. This hierarchical search significantly improves efficiency and success rates in unknown environments without any task-specific training.
From the abstract
Zero-shot object-goal navigation (ZSON) requires navigating unknown environments to find a target object without task-specific training. Prior hierarchical training-free solutions invest in scene understanding (\textit{belief}) and high-level decision-making (\textit{policy}), yet overlook the design of \textit{option}, i.e., a subgoal candidate proposed from evolving belief and presented to policy for selection. In practice, options are reduced to isolated waypoints scored independently: single