Nav2Scene: Navigation-driven fine-tuning for robot-friendly scene generation

The integration of embodied intelligence in indoor scene synthesis holds significant potential for future interior design applications. Nevertheless, prevailing methodologies for indoor scene synthesis predominantly adhere to data-driven learning paradigms. Despite achieving photorealistic 3D renderings through such approaches, current frameworks systematically neglect to incorporate agent-centric functional metrics essential for optimizing navigational topology and task-oriented interactivity in embodied AI systems like service robotics platforms or autonomous domestic assistants. For example, poorly arranged furniture may prevent robots from effectively interacting with the environment, and this issue cannot be fully resolved by merely introducing prior constraints. To fill this gap, we propose Nav2Scene, a novel plug-and-play fine-tuning mechanism that can be deployed on existing scene generators to enhance the suitability of generated scenes for efficient robot navigation. Specifically, we first introduce path planning score (PPS), which is defined based on the results of the path planning algorithm and can be used to evaluate the robot navigation suitability of a given scene. Then, we pre-compute the PPS of 3D scenes from existing datasets and train a ScoreNet to efficiently predict the PPS of the generated scenes. Finally, the predicted PPS is used to guide the fine-tuning of existing scene generators and produce indoor scenes with higher PPS, indicating improved suitability for robot navigation. We conduct experiments on the 3D-FRONT dataset for different tasks including scene generation, completion and re-arrangement. The results demonstrate that by incorporating our Nav2Scene mechanism, the fine-tuned scene generators can produce scenes with improved navigation compatibility for home robots, while maintaining superior or comparable performance in terms of scene quality and diversity.