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Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation

25 Nov 2018CVPR 2019 6arXiv:1811.10092archive 2025-07-28

Xin Wang, Qiuyuan Huang, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jianfeng Gao, Dinghan Shen, Yuan-Fang Wang, William Yang Wang, Lei Zhang

Vision-language navigation (VLN) is the task of navigating an embodied agent to carry out natural language instructions inside real 3D environments. In this paper, we study how to address three critical challenges for this task: the cross-modal grounding, the ill-posed feedback, and the generalization problems. First, we propose a novel Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching (RCM) approach that enforces cross-modal grounding both locally and globally via reinforcement learning (RL). Particularly, a matching critic is used to provide an intrinsic reward to encourage global matching between instructions and trajectories, and a reasoning navigator is employed to perform cross-modal grounding in the local visual scene. Evaluation on a VLN benchmark dataset shows that our RCM model significantly outperforms previous methods by 10% on SPL and achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. To improve the generalizability of the learned policy, we further introduce a Self-Supervised Imitation Learning (SIL) method to explore unseen environments by imitating its own past, good decisions. We demonstrate that SIL can approximate a better and more efficient policy, which tremendously minimizes the success rate performance gap between seen and unseen environments (from 30.7% to 11.7%).

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Tasks

Imitation LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Vision-Language NavigationVisual Navigation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Vision-Language Navigation Room2Room RCM + SIL spl 0.59 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Navigation R2R RCM+SIL(no early exploration) spl 0.38 #10 of 11 Archive leaderboard report

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