cs.CVJul 26, 2026

MemVLN: Episodic and Procedural Memory for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Authors: Yuqi LiuShengju QianTianyuan QuMingxian LinZixuan WangXin WangBei YuJiaya Jia

Organizations: 1The Chinese University of Hong Kong · 2LIGHTSPEED · 3The University of Hong Kong · 4The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Abstract

Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires agents to maintain long-horizon visual history for trajectory consistency while executing actions with low latency. Existing video-based VLN approaches typically struggle to satisfy both demands simultaneously. To address these challenges, we propose MemVLN, a novel VLN framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time inference efficiency (14 FPS). MemVLN utilizes a visual encoder to process continuous observations and a Large Language Model (LLM) to interpret instructions and generate actions. Central to our approach is an Episodic Memory management that applies pyramidal resolutions. This mechanism concentrates computation on immediate percepts while retaining compressed long-term history. Complementing to this design, we introduce Procedural Memory for fast action with a compact vocabulary of atomic mid-level actions to bypass auto-regressive decoding latency. Experiments on VLN-CE show that MemVLN-4B surpasses the baseline Qwen3-VL-4B architecture by 5.8% SR in R2R and 9.7% SR in RxR, while achieving a 7×\times speedup in inference latency.

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