NavHarness: Adaptive Goals for Agentic Vision-Language Navigation

Existing vision-language navigation methods often couple a VLM with waypoint decoders to produce multi-step action plans, but they typically lack an explicit closed-loop mechanism for tracking semantic progress, diagnosing execution failures, and recovering from error accumulation in long-horizon navigation. To address this gap, we propose ReflectVLN, an agentic VLN framework that organizes decision-making through bidirectionally interactive intention and execution agents. The intention agent performs subtask decomposition and reflection, generating executable subtask descriptions as corrective plans. Conditioned on these descriptions, the execution agent grounds them into short-horizon actions under current observations while monitoring sub-goal progress and detecting off-track behavior. Crucially, ReflectVLN enables closed-loop bidirectional communication: the execution agent emits progress and deviation signals to trigger reflection and subtask updates on demand, and the intention agent returns structured guidance that reconditions subsequent actions for recovery. To encourage temporally coherent decisions with interpretable intermediate rationales, we introduce Action Chain-of-Thought (Action-CoT), a path-conditioned dual-query training scheme for action generation. Experiments on standard VLN benchmarks show that ReflectVLN improves success rates and path efficiency under a constrained data budget, with favorable training cost and fewer high-level intention calls at inference time, while providing interpretable intermediate decisions for analysis and collaboration. Code is available at: https://github.com/AIprogrammer/ReflectVLN

Recent zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) methods increasingly rely on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to reason over visual observations, navigation instructions, and candidate actions. Although effective, repeatedly invoking autoregressive multimodal reasoning at every navigation step introduces substantial inference latency, limiting the responsiveness of embodied agents. We propose NavJev, an efficient VLN framework that reformulates online navigation from repeated multimodal generation into compact visual compression followed by lightweight typed action selection. Specifically, Action-Centric Visual Compression (ACVC) integrates waypoint geometry, BLIP captions, and RAM semantic tags into compact representations of candidate actions, while Discriminative Action-Semantic Memory (DASM) filters shared semantics and maintains discriminative action-specific evidence across navigation steps. Based on these representations, Jev directly performs structured probabilistic decisions over the available action set. Experiments on R2R-CE show that NavJev achieves 27.0% SR and 22.4% SPL with only 0.65 s per navigation step, while substantially reducing inference latency and cost compared with MLLM-based VLN methods. The project page is available at https://kai-sheng-caesar.github.io/NavJev/.

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.