StopWatch: A Goal Grounding Approach for Object-Goal Navigation

The StopWatch paper diagnoses that the main reason success rates remain low after fine-tuning pretrained VLMs into navigation policies is a lack of goal grounding: the policy often fails to notice that the goal is already in view or struggles to estimate its distance. The authors propose an explicit grounding method that achieves state-of-the-art results on six benchmarks across three scene collections, and they correct annotation defects in these benchmarks. Analysis on the corrected benchmarks shows that, with ground-truth grounding, the policy nearly reaches the level of the expert that generated its demonstrations, indicating that the bottleneck is perception rather than policy learning.