Vision-Language Navigation

Also known as VLN

Overview

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) asks embodied agents—such as mobile robots and drones—to follow language instructions by interpreting what they see and choosing actions over time. Approaches range from end-to-end vision-language policies to hierarchical systems that combine large models with maps, scene graphs, spatial memory, geometric planners, and world models; imitation learning and reinforcement learning are common training strategies. Methods are tested on benchmarks such as R2R, RxR, REVERIE, VLN-CE, and HM3D, with growing attention to object goals, outdoor and aerial settings, and real-robot deployment. A central challenge is turning correct language and scene understanding into safe, efficient behavior over long routes, where localization drift, changing scenes, limited compute, and the gap between simulation and reality can cause failures.

Latest papers

CardsList

313 papers52 papers in the last four weeks, up 16% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Ask to Evolve: A Unified Harness for Lifelong Embodied Navigation with Hybrid Action Space and Persistent Memory

    Oct 29, 2026Kai Sheng, Liuyi Wang, Jinlong Li +3Embodied NavigationLifelong Learning Agents

  2. What Should a Navigator Remember? Spatiotemporal Memory for Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation

    Oct 28, 2026Yuhang Peng, Zhikai Wang, Ziyi Wang +5Vision-Language NavigationMemory-Augmented VLMs

  3. ASPEN: Adaptive Semantic Reasoning via Command Persistence Prediction for Efficient Navigation VLAs

    Oct 26, 2026Vieri N. Akustia, Bin HuEfficient VLA Model InferenceVision-Language Navigation

  4. MemVLN: Streaming Episodic Memory for Vision-Language Navigation

    Oct 26, 2026Yan Wang, Jiangyong Huang, Siyuan Huang +1Vision-Language NavigationMemory-Augmented VLMs

  5. One Scan is Enough: Demonstration-Free Adaptation for Language-Guided Navigation

    Oct 24, 2026Zhuoyuan Yu, Yuxing Long, Du Wang +3Vision-Language NavigationRobot Policy Adaptation

  6. MOON: Learning When to Forget and How to Move On in Vision-and-Language Navigation

    Oct 24, 2026Jingmeng Zhou, Seson Sun, Binyao Xu +6Vision-Language Navigation

  7. SP-Guide: Enhancing Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with Spatial Priors

    Oct 23, 2026Haoxiang Tang, Dong Zhou, Shen Tan +2Vision-Language NavigationAerial VLN

  8. See What I Need, Dream What I Want: A Navigation Foundation Model on a Self-Constructed Representation Space

    Oct 22, 2026Jiawei Chen, Yinxi Wang, Zihan Yang +12Visual Robot NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  9. EBV-CAN: Vision--Language Grounding for Contact-Aided Endoscope Navigation

    Oct 22, 2026Chi Kit Ng, Shuchang Liu, Jinsong Lin +4Robotic EndoscopyEndoscopy

  10. Asking Less, Adapting Better: Feedback-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-and-Language Navigation

    Oct 22, 2026Zixu Wang, Huaquan Zhang, Shoukai Xu +3Vision-Language NavigationContinual Test-Time Adaptation

  11. KinoUAV: A Benchmark for Safe and Stable UAV Vision-Language Navigation with Kinodynamic Modeling

    Oct 22, 2026Chenyao Yang, Peijin Wang, Yingchao Feng +1Safe Robot NavigationAerial VLN

  12. NavBind: Diagnosing Instruction-Action Binding at Route Forks in Navigation VLAs

    Oct 21, 2026Josh Qixuan Sun, Xiaoying Xing, Yurun Chen +3Vision-Language-Action ModelsVision-Language Navigation

  13. ReInsVLN: Revisiting Historical Evidence for Training-Free Vision-and-Language Navigation

    Oct 19, 2026Siwei Cheng, Hao Wu, Zitong Qi +7Vision-Language NavigationMemory-Augmented VLMs

  14. ScaleNav: Scalable Internet Video Pretraining for Language-Conditioned Local Navigation

    Oct 19, 2026Yihui Yang, Yuanhong Yu, Jiawei Wang +7Vision-Language NavigationRobot Learning from Video

  15. Revealing and Bridging the Physical Executability Gap in Vision-Language Navigation

    Oct 19, 2026Gang He, Zhile Cheng, Kepeng Xu +2Vision-Language NavigationRL for VLMs

  16. Structure over Reasoning: Unified Zero-Shot Navigation with a Small Vision-Language Model

    Oct 18, 2026Zeqi Li, Xunyi Zhao, Zerui Li +3Visual Robot NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  17. HAVANA: A Hierarchical Video-Action Model for Vision-Language Navigation

    Oct 16, 2026Dongzhihan Wang, Yi Du, Chen Wang +2Vision-Language NavigationVisual Robot Navigation

  18. SimpleVLN: Towards Simple and Frontier Vision-Language Navigation

    Oct 16, 2026Lingyi Hong, Weiren Cai, Jiayu Chen +7Vision-Language NavigationLarge Vision-Language Models

  19. PASS-VLN: Passability-Aware Local-Command Vision-and-Language Navigation

    Oct 16, 2026Cong Zou, Xiangsheng Shi, Xuanhui Wang +4Robot NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  20. Training-Free Target-Aware Refinement of 3D Gaussian Language Map

    Oct 15, 2026Sibaek Lee, Kyeongsu Kang, Seongbo Ha +9Language-Embedded 3DGSOpen-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation

  21. S3S^3-Nav: Structured Spatial-Semantic Decision Making for Language-Guided Robot Navigation

    Oct 14, 2026Chaemin Lee, Hae Min ChoRobot NavigationEmbodied Navigation

  22. MemoryVLN: From Ego-Aware Memory Representation to Cross-Context Memory Reuse in Vision-Language Navigation

    Oct 13, 2026Xueyao Wei, Yifei Wang, Delun Li +4Vision-Language NavigationMemory-Augmented VLMs

  23. Data-Centric Recursive Self-Improvement for Navigation via Policy-Synchronized Language-Action Dual Bootstrapping

    Oct 11, 2026Songze Li, Haoming Gu, Ziyang Gong +11Vision-Language NavigationVision-Language-Action Models

  24. FireNav: Decision-Oriented Reconstruction Evidence Routing for Vision-Language Navigation in Indoor Fire Environments

    Oct 11, 2026Hongbo Ding, Xiang Chen, Jiangxin Dong +1Vision-Language Navigation

  25. Training-Free Multi-Agent Cooperative Embodied Search from Uncertain Vision-Language Priors

    Oct 10, 2026Fan Pu, Keshu Wu, Jiwan Jiang +5Vision-Language NavigationMulti-Agent Planning

  26. Successful but Unsafe: An Analytical Benchmark for Revealing Collisions in Vision-and-Language Navigation

    Oct 10, 2026Hieu D. Pham, Quoc-An Luong, Dung D. LeSafe Robot NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  27. GG-Nav: Goal-oriented Grounding Chain-of-Thought Elicits Reasoning in Navigation Foundation Models

    Oct 10, 2026Shaohao Zhu, Wensi Huang, Siqi Zhang +6Vision-Language NavigationRobot Navigation