A Navigation Framework Utilizing Vision-Language Models
This work addresses the problem of efficient and adaptable navigation for embodied AI agents, though it is incremental as it builds on existing vision-language models with a new modular approach.
The paper tackles the challenge of Vision-and-Language Navigation by proposing a modular framework that decouples vision-language understanding from action planning, using a frozen model and lightweight logic to aim for flexible navigation, but initial results show difficulties in generalizing to unseen environments.
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) presents a complex challenge in embodied AI, requiring agents to interpret natural language instructions and navigate through visually rich, unfamiliar environments. Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs), such as CLIP and Flamingo, have significantly improved multimodal understanding but introduced new challenges related to computational cost and real-time deployment. In this project, we propose a modular, plug-and-play navigation framework that decouples vision-language understanding from action planning. By integrating a frozen vision-language model, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, with lightweight planning logic, we aim to achieve flexible, fast, and adaptable navigation without extensive model fine-tuning. Our framework leverages prompt engineering, structured history management, and a two-frame visual input strategy to enhance decision-making continuity across navigation steps. We evaluate our system on the Room-to-Room benchmark within the VLN-CE setting using the Matterport3D dataset and Habitat-Lab simulation environment. Although our initial results reveal challenges in generalizing to unseen environments under strict evaluation settings, our modular approach lays a foundation for scalable and efficient navigation systems, highlighting promising directions for future improvement through enhanced environmental priors and expanded multimodal input integration.