On-policy exploration is a crucial component for training robust Vision-Language Navigation agents, as it exposes the policy to a broader state distribution. However, such exploration inevitably leads to trajectories that deviate from expert demonstrations, resulting in a semantic mismatch between the executed visual stream and the original language instruction.
SeekVLN is a new framework for Vision‑Language Navigation that addresses the problem of agents acting on insufficient evidence, termed Progress Myopia. It combines semantic progress reasoning with active evidence seeking, trained first with Future‑guided Reverse Generation to augment expert trajectories, and then refined via Counterfactual Contrastive Policy Optimization to reward beneficial seeking actions. Experiments on simulated benchmarks show significant gains, improving success rates by 12.7% on R2R‑CE and 7.5% on RxR‑CE, and real‑world tests demonstrate human‑like evidence‑seeking behavior.
By Zhimin Wang, Meiyuan Zhu, Duo Wu, Linjia Kang, Yajun Wang, Yuan Ni, Xiaohang Wang, Tianlu Pan, Jingyan Jiang, Yaowei Wang, Zhi Wang
arXiv:2609.39915v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires embodied agents to generate actions based on instructions and observations. General-purpose multimodal agents...
By Haoxiang Shi, Zaijing Li, Muhe Ding, Xiang Deng, Yaowei Wang, Liqiang Nie
arXiv:2606. 12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal.
By Arthur Zhang, Carl Qi, Donne Su, Xiangyun Meng, Amy Zhang, Joydeep Biswas
arXiv:2609.24576v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) models rely mostly on pre-trained large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to predict navigation actions. While th...
By D\'ebora Oliveira Makowski, Samiran Gode, Abhijeet Nayak, Marco Hutter, Cordelia Schmid, Lukas Rosenberger Schmid, Wolfram Burgard
arXiv:2609.32292v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-and-language navigation increasingly relies on general-purpose semantic planners, yet translating correct high-level intent into relia...
By Xuekang Yang, Lu Chen, Shuang Luo, Jialing Zhu, Qi Zhang, Yue Gao, Xiang Zhang
arXiv:2607. 10383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual Language Navigation foundation models aim to unify deep reasoning for grounded spatial decisions with broad versatility for diverse embodied tasks.
By Ruiyan Gong, Yingnan Guo, Junjun Hu, Jintao Kong, Xiaoxu Leng, Tianlun Li, Weize Li, Fei Liu, Zhicheng Liu, Jia Lu, Minghua Luo, Chenlin Ming, Yanfen Shen, Jiyue Tao, Zhengbo Wang, Mingyang Yin, Minqi Gu, Zihao Guan, Wei Guo, Guoqing Liu, Huachong Pang, Menglin Yang, Zeqian Ye, Xiaoxiao Geng, Zhining Gu, Honglin Han, Di Jing, Hongyu Pan, Mingchao Sun, Kuan Yang, Jianfang Zhang, Yanghong Chen, Ye He, Wei Mei, Jiahao Shi, Xiangpo Yang, Yanqing Zhu, Zedong Chu, Xiaolong Wu, Mu Xu
arXiv:2603.26741v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Goal-conditioned visual navigation has been a long-standing testbed for embodied AI. We study a natural language-conditioned variant, languag...
By Yifei Dong, Fengyi Wu, Yilong Dai, Lingdong Kong, Guangyu Chen, Yetong Sha, Qiyu Hu, Feng Liu, Siyu Huang, Qi Dai, Zhi-Qi Cheng
arXiv:2606. 29892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become indispensable for pushing Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) beyond static imitation learning.
By Siyao Chen, Jiakang Yuan, Jiaxin Wang, Tao Chen
arXiv:2606. 12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone.
By Hyun Joe Jeong, Gokul Swamy, Andrea Bajcsy
LookStep is a new end‑to‑end framework for Vision‑Language Navigation that integrates Language‑Centric Future State Modeling with an Event‑Driven Rolling Memory. It uses language labels to predict coarse navigation progress and future states for candidate actions, and autonomously decides which observations to store in a bounded memory with semantic roles. Empirical results show that LookStep outperforms existing methods on VLN‑CE tasks, achieving a 49.7% success rate on R2R‑CE Val‑Unseen while improving memory efficiency and reducing data requirements.
By Kun-Yang Yu, Yingzhe Li, Hongyu Xu, Shi-Yu Tian, Zhi Zhou, Yang Chen, Ming Yang, Sheng Wang, Qing Yu, Lan-Zhe Guo, Yu-Feng Li
AVERT-VLN introduces a closed‑loop framework for vision‑and‑language navigation that incorporates an abstention‑aware Monitor to detect instruction‑execution inconsistencies. The Monitor is trained on a new LOSTNAV dataset of 20K counterfactual risk trajectories and fine‑tuned on 40K normal trajectories to recognize semantic deviations. During deployment, the Monitor can suspend autonomous navigation and request human guidance, while offline preference learning uses deviation‑associated failures to improve the policy, achieving 76.2% and 66.3% success on R2R‑CE and RxR‑CE unseen splits.
By Minrui Liu, Jingke Wang, Yuehao Huang, Hao Su, Jiajun Lv, Yukai Ma, Yong Liu