TANGO: Training-free Embodied AI Agents for Open-world Tasks
Filippo Ziliotto, Tommaso Campari, Luciano Serafini, Lamberto Ballan
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in composing various modules together to create programs that can perform complex reasoning tasks on images. In this paper, we propose TANGO, an approach that extends the program composition via LLMs already observed for images, aiming to integrate those capabilities into embodied agents capable of observing and acting in the world. Specifically, by employing a simple PointGoal Navigation model combined with a memory-based exploration policy as a foundational primitive for guiding an agent through the world, we show how a single model can address diverse tasks without additional training. We task an LLM with composing the provided primitives to solve a specific task, using only a few in-context examples in the prompt. We evaluate our approach on three key Embodied AI tasks: Open-Set ObjectGoal Navigation, Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation, and Open Embodied Question Answering, achieving state-of-the-art results without any specific fine-tuning in challenging zero-shot scenarios.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Cited by top-tier papers10
- Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive TasksWenqi Zhang, Mengna Wang, Gangao Liu, Huixin Xu et al.ACL 2026 · 53 citations
- Geometrically-Constrained Agent for Spatial ReasoningZeren Chen, Xiaoya Lu, Zhijie Zheng, Pengrui Li et al.CVPR 2026 · 29 citations
- MSGNav: Unleashing the Power of Multi-modal 3D Scene Graph for Zero-Shot Embodied NavigationXun Huang, Shijia Zhao, Yunxiang Wang, Xin Lu et al.CVPR 2026 · 19 citations
- Move to Understand a 3D Scene: Bridging Visual Grounding and Exploration for Efficient and Versatile Embodied NavigationZiyu Zhu, Xilin Wang, Yixuan Li, Zhuofan Zhang et al.ICCV 2025 · 11 citations
- AstraNav-Memory: Contexts Compression for Long MemoryJunjun Hu, Xinda Xue, Botao Ren, Minghua Luo et al.CVPR 2026 · 5 citations
Builds on16
- Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language SupervisionAlec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh et al.ICML 2021 · 47,906 citations
- BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language ModelsJunnan Li, Dongxu Li, Silvio Savarese, Steven C. H. HoiICML 2023 · 7,873 citations
- Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI ResearchManolis Savva, Jitendra Malik, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra et al.ICCV 2019 · 1,863 citations
- Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied AgentsWenlong Huang, Pieter Abbeel, Deepak Pathak, Igor MordatchICML 2022 · 1,539 citations
- Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic ExplorationDevendra Singh Chaplot, Dhiraj Gandhi, Abhinav Gupta, Ruslan SalakhutdinovNeurIPS 2020 · 857 citations
Related papers
- FLAME: Learning to Navigate with Multimodal LLM in Urban EnvironmentsYunzhe Xu, Yiyuan Pan, Zhe Liu, Hesheng WangAAAI 2025 · 3 citations
- An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D WorldJiangyong Huang, Silong Yong, Xiaojian Ma, Xiongkun Linghu et al.ICML 2024 · 361 citations
- NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language ModelsGengze Zhou, Yicong Hong, Qi WuAAAI 2024 · 361 citations
- Towards Learning a Generalist Model for Embodied NavigationDuo Zheng, Shijia Huang, Lin Zhao, Yiwu Zhong et al.CVPR 2024 · 37 citations
- Explore with Long-term Memory: A Benchmark and Multimodal LLM-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Embodied ExplorationSen Wang, Bangwei Liu, Zhenkun Gao, Lizhuang Ma et al.CVPR 2026 · 14 citations
