RetroNav: Scene-Grounded Retrospection and Retry for Self-Evolving Lifelong Navigation

Abstract

Existing robot navigation methods primarily focus on isolated tasks, overlooking the need to accumulate knowledge and experience across repeated navigation episodes. Although recent lifelong navigation methods have explored cross-task knowledge accumulation, they mainly focus on scene knowledge while neglecting historical navigation experience and its connection to scene evidence, limiting the ability to reflect on past mistakes and improve future decisions. To address this limitation, this paper presents RetroNav, a training-free self-evolving navigation framework that integrates navigation, memory accumulation, and failure reflection. Specifically, we develop a unified memory system that connects geometric and semantic scene knowledge with historical navigation experience, distinguishing objective observations from task-dependent interpretations. After each navigation attempt, an independent evaluator determines whether a retry is necessary. If so, a Retrospection Agent revisits historical decisions using accumulated scene knowledge and navigation records, generating an evidence-grounded retry brief to guide the next attempt. RetroNav achieves state-of-the-art performance across five navigation benchmarks. Our method will be open-sourced at https://github.com/3dv-casia/RetroNav .