CLASH: Collaborative Large-Small Hierarchical Framework for Continuous Vision-and-Language Navigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10360v2
• Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:54:08 GMT
• Title: CLASH: Collaborative Large-Small Hierarchical Framework for Continuous Vision-and-Language Navigation
• Abstract summary: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires robots to follow natural language instructions and navigate complex environments without prior maps.<n>We propose CLASH, a VLN-CE framework that integrates a reactive small-model planner (RSMP) with a reflective large-model reasoner (RLMR)<n>In simulation, we replace the rule-based controller with a fully learnable point-goal policy, and in real-world deployment, we design a LiDAR-based clustering module for generating navigable waypoints.
• Score: 38.37757288365413
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires robots to follow natural language instructions and navigate complex environments without prior maps. While recent vision-language large models demonstrate strong reasoning abilities, they often underperform task-specific panoramic small models in VLN tasks. To address this, we propose CLASH (Collaborative Large-Small Hierarchy), a VLN-CE framework that integrates a reactive small-model planner (RSMP) with a reflective large-model reasoner (RLMR). RSMP adopts a causal-learning-based dual-branch architecture to enhance generalization, while RLMR leverages panoramic visual prompting with chain-of-thought reasoning to support interpretable spatial understanding and navigation. We further introduce an uncertainty-aware collaboration mechanism (UCM) that adaptively fuses decisions from both models. For obstacle avoidance, in simulation, we replace the rule-based controller with a fully learnable point-goal policy, and in real-world deployment, we design a LiDAR-based clustering module for generating navigable waypoints and pair it with an online SLAM-based local controller. CLASH achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) results (ranking 1-st) on the VLN-CE leaderboard, significantly improving SR and SPL on the test-unseen set over the previous SoTA methods. Real-world experiments demonstrate CLASH's strong robustness, validating its effectiveness in both simulation and deployment scenarios.

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