Multi-Scale Gaussian-Language Map for Embodied Navigation and Reasoning
Abstract
Understanding the geometric and semantic structure of environments is essential for embodied agents. Existing semantic mapping methods trade off between explicit geometry and multi-scale semantics,and lack a native interface for large models, thus requiring additional training of feature projection for semantic alignment. To this end, we propose the multi-scale Gaussian-Language Map (GLMap), which introduces three key designs: (1) explicit geometry, (2) multi-scale semantics covering both instance and region level concepts, and (3) a dual-modality interface where each semantic unit jointly stores a natural language description and a 3D Gaussian representation. The 3D Gaussians enable compact storage and fast rendering of task-relevant images via Gaussian splatting. To enable efficient incremental construction, we further propose a Gaussian Estimator that analytically derives Gaussian parameters from dense point clouds without gradient-based optimization. Experiments on ObjectNav, InstNav, and SQA tasks show that GLMap effectively enhances target localization and contextual reasoning, while remaining compatible with large-model-based methods in a zero-shot manner.