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arXiv · 2610.30589

OASIS: Online Anchor-centric Scene Inference System for Open-Vocabulary Retrieval and Navigation in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Reliable robotic mapping in dynamic real-world environments is essential for embodied intelligence and long-term autonomy. However, existing methods often involve a trade-off: lightweight online mapping is efficient but captures limited semantic context, while dense mapping provides richer semantics at higher computational cost and is more vulnerable to distractors. They also struggle to relocalize objects after scene changes. To address these challenges, we propose the Online Anchor-centric Scene Inference System (OASIS), a unified system for online mapping, complex open-vocabulary retrieval, and navigation in dynamic environments. Motivated by the observation that indoor scenes are organized around stable semantic anchors, OASIS represents the environment using a sparse set of anchor nodes, each maintaining a unified multimodal representation that integrates semantic descriptions, visual features, and geometric states for reasoning, verification, and navigation. Its compact anchor-centric memory supports on-demand evidence extraction and hierarchical retrieval, reducing redundant storage while improving retrieval reliability. To handle scene dynamics, OASIS further reuses transient observations collected during navigation to relocalize moved objects. Experiments in both simulation and real-world environments, including standard retrieval benchmarks and navigation tasks under both static and dynamic settings, demonstrate that our system can perform complex open-vocabulary retrieval and navigation, while also enabling relocation of displaced objects after scene changes.

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BibTeXRIS

Kaiyao Liao, Qingfeng Li, Chen Chen, Xiaoze Wu, Qing Sun, Jianwei Niu. 2026-10-22. OASIS: Online Anchor-centric Scene Inference System for Open-Vocabulary Retrieval and Navigation in Dynamic Environments. https://doi.org/10.1145/3767308.3835228

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