AwareVLN: Reasoning with Self-awareness for Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Wenxuan Guo, Xiuwei Xu, Yichen Liu, Xiangyu Li, Hang Yin, Huangxing Chen, Wenzhao Zheng, Jianjiang Feng, +2 more
Organizations: Tsinghua University, China
Abstract
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to ground language instructions to its own movement within a visual environment. While state-of-the-art methods leverage the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for end-to-end action prediction, they often lack an explicit and explainable understanding of the relationships between the agent, the instruction, and the scene. Conversely, explicitly building a scene map for heuristic planning is intuitively appealing but relies on additional 3D sensors and hinders large-scale vision-language pre-training. To bridge this gap, we propose AwareVLN, a novel framework that equips the navigation model with a self-aware reasoning mechanism, enabling it to understand the agent's state and task progress in a fully end-to-end and data-driven manner. Our approach features two key innovations: (1) a structural reasoning module that fosters spatial and task-oriented self-awareness, and (2) an automatic data engine with progress division for effective training. Extensive experiments on various datasets in Habitat simulator show our AwareVLN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art vision-language navigation methods. Project page: https://gwxuan.github.io/AwareVLN/.
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) approaches have currently followed two primary paradigms: the end-to-end Vision-Language Model (VLM) policy fine-tuned on navigation trajectories to directly predict actions, and the zero-shot modular pipeline integrating pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for training-free generalization to unseen environments. However, end-to-end methods struggle with long-horizon navigation and lack dynamic reasoning, whereas zero-shot methods are constrained by limited spatial grounding for reliable planning and also require substantial reasoning time. To bridge this gap, we introduce SEDualVLN, a spatially-enhanced dual-system VLN framework. System 1 is a VLM model enhanced with both global and local spatial awareness, used for action generation. System 2 integrates a general MLLM with a mapping module, wherein the MLLM plans waypoints by leveraging top-down views of the real-time 3D map alongside streams of rendered path images. Both systems leverage different forms of spatial enhancement to cultivate the agent's sense of direction in VLN tasks. Ultimately, they cooperate to complete the navigation task through a fast-slow coordinated approach. SEDualVLN achieves state-of-the-art performance on VLN-CE benchmarks, and further ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each system and module.
Although vision-language models (VLMs) possess strong visual understanding and reasoning capabilities, existing vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents struggle to connect semantic reasoning with spatial execution. Two coupled gaps remain in this connection, as intermediate reasoning is not explicitly anchored to visual evidence and high-level decisions lack precise spatial goals to guide low-level motion. Cognitive science suggests that human navigation bridges these levels hierarchically by anchoring cognition to relevant landmarks and guiding locomotion toward spatial goals. Motivated by this principle, we propose GroundingVLN, which uses visual grounding as a shared interface between reasoning and action. GroundingVLN first reasons with grounding by anchoring task-relevant visual evidence to precise image locations throughout structured reasoning. It then acts through grounding by predicting a progress-aligned pixel goal that a geometric planner translates into primitive actions. To learn these capabilities, we construct GroundingCOTVLN-188K, a dataset of temporally aligned grounded reasoning traces, and introduce Grounded and Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning (GEAR), which aligns grounded reasoning and spatial decisions with downstream execution. Experiments demonstrate that GroundingVLN achieves state-of-the-art performance (69.9% SR on R2R-CE and 75.1% SR on RxR-CE) with high sample efficiency, using just 0.9% as much training data as the strongest baseline. It also generalizes strongly across datasets, attaining 59.9% SR on RxR-CE when trained solely on R2R, a gain of 20.1% over the strongest baseline.
Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) in continuous environments requires an agent to ground instructions in egocentric observations while maintaining spatial understanding across long action sequences. Recent navigation foundation models have shown strong progress by scaling vision-language models, but they often learn navigation primarily as direct action generation, without explicitly modeling world states or predicting their future evolution. We introduce FutureNav, a VLM-based unified world-action modeling framework for vision-and-language navigation. Specifically, FutureNav jointly encodes text, visual, and spatial features and feeds them into the LLM, and optimizes four objectives for simultaneous world and action modeling: an action policy objective for navigation action prediction, inverse and forward dynamics objectives for modeling state transitions, and a future generation objective for predicting future spatial states. This unified architecture strengthens action prediction while explicitly modeling the world, without sacrificing inference speed. Extensive experiments show that, with only a 4B-scale backbone, FutureNav achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple VLN benchmarks and substantially outperforms prior VLN methods, paving the way toward future world-action models for VLN. We will release the code and models to support future research.