SmartWay: Enhanced Waypoint Prediction and Backtracking for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10069v2
• Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2025 05:47:59 GMT
• Title: SmartWay: Enhanced Waypoint Prediction and Backtracking for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation
• Authors: Xiangyu Shi, Zerui Li, Wenqi Lyu, Jiatong Xia, Feras Dayoub, Yanyuan Qiao, Qi Wu,
• Abstract summary: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in continuous environments requires agents to interpret natural language instructions while navigating unconstrained 3D spaces.<n>Existing VLN-CE frameworks rely on a two-stage approach: a waypoint predictor to generate waypoints and a navigator to execute movements.<n>We propose a zero-shot VLN-CE framework integrating an enhanced waypoint predictor with a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based navigator.
• Score: 12.152477445938759
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in continuous environments requires agents to interpret natural language instructions while navigating unconstrained 3D spaces. Existing VLN-CE frameworks rely on a two-stage approach: a waypoint predictor to generate waypoints and a navigator to execute movements. However, current waypoint predictors struggle with spatial awareness, while navigators lack historical reasoning and backtracking capabilities, limiting adaptability. We propose a zero-shot VLN-CE framework integrating an enhanced waypoint predictor with a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based navigator. Our predictor employs a stronger vision encoder, masked cross-attention fusion, and an occupancy-aware loss for better waypoint quality. The navigator incorporates history-aware reasoning and adaptive path planning with backtracking, improving robustness. Experiments on R2R-CE and MP3D benchmarks show our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in zero-shot settings, demonstrating competitive results compared to fully supervised methods. Real-world validation on Turtlebot 4 further highlights its adaptability.

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