arXiv Computer Vision

Explaining Navigation Decisions: Stage-Aware Visual Attribution for Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 12

Robust Vision-Language Navigation with Awareness of Instruction-Execution Progress

The paper introduces VLN-AIEP, a Vision‑Language Navigation framework that integrates instruction‑execution progress awareness into navigation decisions. By linking the visited trajectory to the instruction, it suppresses embeddings of already executed content and matches candidate locations with pending instruction segments. The method employs a landmark‑anchored trajectory representation to encode semantic labels and geometry, enabling progress estimation without explicit supervision and achieving strong results on R2R, RxR, CVDN, and R2R‑CE benchmarks.

By Jiagan Huang, Zikun Zhou, Hongpeng Wang, Guangming Lu, Jun Yu, Wenjie Pei
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

What do VLM-Based Vision-Language Navigation Models Rely on: Interpreting and Steering Policy Behavior

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 AI
Jul 3

CoFL-S: Spatially Queryable Sector Flow Fields for Local Language-Conditioned Navigation

arXiv:2607. 02222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation has increasingly emphasized high-level instruction reasoning, memory, global map construction, and instruction decomposition, while the low-level action representation remains comparatively underexplored.

By Haokun Liu, Zhaoqi Ma, Yicheng Chen, Wentao Zhang, Masaki Kitagawa, Zicen Xiong, Jinjie Li, Moju Zhao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

FailureSpot: Label-Efficient Timestamp-Level Failure Detection for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces FailureSpot, a label‑efficient method for detecting failures at the timestamp level in vision‑language‑action (VLA) policies. It first generates weak supervision from unlabeled VLA action chunks by identifying abnormal patterns, then employs active learning to annotate only the most uncertain trajectories. Experiments on multiple VLA policies demonstrate improved performance for both timestamp‑level and trajectory‑level failure detection.

By Jie Ma, Zongxi Liu, Yi Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Hide-and-Seek in Trajectories: Discovering Failure Signals for VLA Runtime Monitoring

The paper introduces Hide-and-Seek, a framework for detecting failures in Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models during robot execution. It treats failure detection as a coarsely supervised learning problem, using inter‑trajectory and intra‑trajectory contrastive objectives to localize failure‑indicative actions without step‑level annotations. Experiments on LIBERO, VLABench, and a real‑world robotic platform show that Hide‑and‑Seek achieves state‑of‑the‑art multi‑task failure detection performance across several VLA policies.

By Seongheon Park, Wendi Li, Changdae Oh, Samuel Yeh, Zsolt Kira, Michael Hagenow, Sharon Li
arXiv AI
Oct 9

ExecVLA: Following Fine-Grained Execution Constraints in Vision-Language-Action Models with Bi-Level Action Representation

The paper introduces ExecVLA, a framework for vision‑language‑action models that separates goal‑oriented behavior from execution‑specific constraints using a bi‑level action representation and supervised reasoning tokens. It adds explicit objectives to keep goal representations stable while preserving execution constraints, and builds datasets with fine‑grained reasoning annotations in simulation and on a Realman‑75 robot. Experiments on LIBERO and the real robot demonstrate better goal completion and notably more reliable adherence to instruction‑specified execution constraints.

By Gaoge Han, Zhengqing Gao, Ziwen Li, Jiaxin Huang, Shaoli Huang, Fakhri Karray, Mingming Gong, Tongliang Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Same Scene, Different Task: Skill Alignment for Compositional Generalization in VLAs

The paper introduces CRAFT, a method for improving compositional generalization in vision‑language‑action (VLA) models. It addresses the issue where models rely on visual shortcuts during fine‑tuning, leading them to execute demonstrated skill combinations that match observations rather than the instructed ones. By training with counterfactual instruction–observation pairs and transferring supervision through reusable skill representations, CRAFT enhances success on unseen skill combinations while preserving performance on demonstrated ones across multiple VLA models and benchmarks.

By Taegeun Yang, Youngju Na, Yoonki Cho, Sung-Eui Yoon