Auxiliary Tasks and Exploration Enable ObjectGoal Navigation

ObjectGoal Navigation (ObjectNav) is an embodied task wherein agents are to navigate to an object instance in an unseen environment. Prior works have shown that end-to-end ObjectNav agents that use vanilla visual and recurrent modules, e.g. a CNN+RNN, perform poorly due to overfitting and sample inefficiency. This has motivated current state-of-the-art methods to mix analytic and learned component…