Hao Chen
Publications
3DGSNav: Enhancing Vision-Language Model Reasoning for Object Navigation via Active 3D Gaussian Splatting
Object navigation is a core capability of embodied intelligence, enabling an agent to locate target objects in unknown environments. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have facilitated zero-shot object navigation (ZSON). However, existing methods often rely on scene abstractions that convert environments into semantic maps or textual representations, causing high-level decision making to be constrained by the accuracy of low-level perception. In this work, we present 3DGSNav, a novel ZSON framework that embeds 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as persistent memory for VLMs to enhance spatial reasoning. Through active perception, 3DGSNav incrementally constructs a 3DGS representation of the environment, enabling trajectory-guided free-viewpoint rendering of frontier-aware first-person views. Moreover, we design structured visual prompts and integrate them with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to further improve VLM reasoning. During navigation, a real-time object detector filters potential targets, while VLM-driven active viewpoint switching performs target re-verification, ensuring efficient and reliable recognition. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks and real-world experiments on a quadruped robot demonstrate that our method achieves robust and competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches.The Project Page:https://aczheng-cai.github.io/3dgsnav.github.io/
Scalable Adaptation of 3D Geometric Foundation Models via Weak Supervision from Internet Video
Geometric foundation models show promise in 3D reconstruction, yet their progress is severely constrained by the scarcity of diverse, large-scale 3D annotations. While Internet videos offer virtually unlimited raw data, utilizing them as a scaling source for geometric learning is challenging due to the absence of ground-truth geometry and the presence of observational noise. To address this, we propose SAGE, a framework for Scalable Adaptation of GEometric foundation models from raw video streams. SAGE leverages a hierarchical mining pipeline to transform videos into training trajectories and hybrid supervision: (1) Informative training trajectory selection; (2) Sparse Geometric Anchoring via SfM point clouds for global structural guidance; and (3) Dense Differentiable Consistency via 3D Gaussian rendering for multi-view constraints. To prevent catastrophic forgetting, we introduce a regularization strategy using anchor data. Extensive experiments show that SAGE significantly enhances zero-shot generalization, reducing Chamfer Distance by 20-42% on unseen benchmarks (7Scenes, TUM-RGBD, Matterport3D) compared to state-of-the-art baselines. To our knowledge, SAGE pioneers the adaptation of geometric foundation models via Internet video, establishing a scalable paradigm for general-purpose 3D learning.