Counterfactual Cycle-Consistent Learning for Instruction Following and Generation in Vision-Language Navigation
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing vision-language navigation systems by integrating complementary tasks, though it is incremental in building upon existing VLN methods.
The paper tackles the problem of simultaneously learning instruction following and generation in vision-language navigation by exploiting cross-task correlations through a cycle-consistent learning scheme, resulting in improved performance for follower models and accurate instruction generation on a standard benchmark.
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.