{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/counterfactual-cycle-consistent-learning-for","title":"Counterfactual Cycle-Consistent Learning for Instruction Following and Generation in Vision-Language Navigation","arxiv_id":"2203.16586","date":"2022-03-30","proceeding":"CVPR 2022 1","authors":["Hanqing Wang","Wei Liang","Jianbing Shen","Luc van Gool","Wenguan Wang"],"abstract":"Since the rise of vision-language navigation (VLN), great progress has been made in instruction following -- building a follower to navigate environments under the guidance of instructions. However, far less attention has been paid to the inverse task: instruction generation -- learning a speaker~to generate grounded descriptions for navigation routes. Existing VLN methods train a speaker independently and often treat it as a data augmentation tool to strengthen the follower while ignoring rich cross-task relations. Here we describe an approach that learns the two tasks simultaneously and exploits their intrinsic correlations to boost the training of each: the follower judges whether the speaker-created instruction explains the original navigation route correctly, and vice versa. Without the need of aligned instruction-path pairs, such cycle-consistent learning scheme is complementary to task-specific training targets defined on labeled data, and can also be applied over unlabeled paths (sampled without paired instructions). Another agent, called~creator is added to generate counterfactual environments. It greatly changes current scenes yet leaves novel items -- which are vital for the execution of original instructions -- unchanged. Thus more informative training scenes are synthesized and the three agents compose a powerful VLN learning system. Extensive experiments on a standard benchmark show that our approach improves the performance of various follower models and produces accurate navigation instructions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16586v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16586v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"counterfactual-cycle-consistent-learning-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/hanqingwangai/ccc-vln","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"data-augmentation","task_name":"Data Augmentation"},{"task_slug":"instruction-following","task_name":"Instruction Following"},{"task_slug":"navigate","task_name":"Navigate"},{"task_slug":"vision-language-navigation","task_name":"Vision-Language Navigation"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2203.16586","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}