Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned — ONNX Models

ONNX-optimized exports of visual navigation models for deployment on physical robots (e.g., Boston Dynamic Spot, AgileX Limo, AgileX Bunker). These exports are derived from the original works listed below — all credit for architectures and training goes to the respective authors.

See https://github.com/MaevaGuerrier/vnm-zeroshot-eval for deployment instructions.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the authors of the following works, whose open-source models made this evaluation possible.

Citations

If you use this work, please cite:

@article{guerrier2026vnm,
  title   = {Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned},
  author  = {Guerrier, Maeva and Soma, Karthik and Pavlasek, Jana and Beltrame, Giovanni},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.25937},
  year    = {2026}
}

Consider citing the original models as well:

@misc{shah2023gnmgeneralnavigationmodel,
      title={GNM: A General Navigation Model to Drive Any Robot}, 
      author={Dhruv Shah and Ajay Sridhar and Arjun Bhorkar and Noriaki Hirose and Sergey Levine},
      year={2023},
      eprint={2210.03370},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03370}, 
}

@misc{shah2023vintfoundationmodelvisual,
      title={ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation}, 
      author={Dhruv Shah and Ajay Sridhar and Nitish Dashora and Kyle Stachowicz and Kevin Black and Noriaki Hirose and Sergey Levine},
      year={2023},
      eprint={2306.14846},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14846}, 
}

@misc{sridhar2023nomadgoalmaskeddiffusion,
      title={NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration}, 
      author={Ajay Sridhar and Dhruv Shah and Catherine Glossop and Sergey Levine},
      year={2023},
      eprint={2310.07896},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07896}, 
}

@misc{ren2025priordoesmattervisual,
      title={Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models}, 
      author={Hao Ren and Yiming Zeng and Zetong Bi and Zhaoliang Wan and Junlong Huang and Hui Cheng},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2504.10041},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10041}, 
}

@misc{doshi2024scalingcrossembodiedlearningpolicy,
      title={Scaling Cross-Embodied Learning: One Policy for Manipulation, Navigation, Locomotion and Aviation}, 
      author={Ria Doshi and Homer Walke and Oier Mees and Sudeep Dasari and Sergey Levine},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2408.11812},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11812}, 
}