VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy
Researchers have developed VANDERER, a novel exploration framework for mobile agents that utilizes a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This VCM predicts action outcomes via a navigation world model and calculates a curiosity cost to steer the diffusion process towards maximizing exploration. Tested in simulated environments, VANDERER demonstrated superior performance, exploring 13.4% more area than the NoMaD baseline and showing a correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor settings. AI