OccPlanner: Goal-Aware Occupancy-Conditioned Diffusion Planner for PixelGoal Navigation

Abstract

PixelGoal navigation specifies targets directly in the agent's camera view, providing a natural interface between high-level visual reasoning and low-level navigation. Depth can lift a visible target pixel into a metric PointGoal, but this estimate becomes unreliable under occlusion or sensor noise. Moreover, a PointGoal alone does not encode traversability or feasible paths around obstacles. We present OccPlanner, a goal-aware occupancy-conditioned diffusion planner that learns complementary egocentric goal and planning-oriented 3D representations through metric target and occupancy prediction, respectively. These representations condition a diffusion trajectory module to generate target-directed, obstacle-aware trajectories. For scalable geometric supervision, we introduce L3ROcc, which converts monocular RGB navigation videos into aligned 3D occupancy and trajectory annotations. We train OccPlanner on L3ROcc-processed InternData-N1 and evaluate it in closed-loop simulation across four unseen InternScenes categories and two goal-distance ranges. Across all eight settings, OccPlanner substantially outperforms existing open-source PixelGoal approaches and achieves competitive performance against PointGoal planners with direct metric-goal inputs.