Unseen from Seen: Rewriting Observation-Instruction Using Foundation Models for Augmenting Vision-Language Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wei, Ziming, Lin, Bingqian, Nie, Yunshuang, Chen, Jiaqi, Ma, Shikui, Xu, Hang, Liang, Xiaodan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wei, Ziming
Lin, Bingqian
Nie, Yunshuang
Chen, Jiaqi
Ma, Shikui
Xu, Hang
Liang, Xiaodan
author_facet Wei, Ziming
Lin, Bingqian
Nie, Yunshuang
Chen, Jiaqi
Ma, Shikui
Xu, Hang
Liang, Xiaodan
contents Data scarcity is a long-standing challenge in the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) field, which extremely hinders the generalization of agents to unseen environments. Previous works primarily rely on additional simulator data or web-collected images/videos to improve the generalization. However, the simulator environments still face limited diversity, and the web-collected data often requires extensive labor to remove the noise. In this paper, we propose a Rewriting-driven AugMentation (RAM) paradigm for VLN, which directly creates the unseen observation-instruction pairs via rewriting human-annotated training data. Benefiting from our rewriting mechanism, new observation-instruction pairs can be obtained in both simulator-free and labor-saving manners to promote generalization. Specifically, we first introduce Object-Enriched Observation Rewriting, where we combine Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive rewritten object-enriched scene descriptions, enabling observation synthesis with diverse objects and spatial layouts via Text-to-Image Generation Models (T2IMs). Then, we propose Observation-Contrast Instruction Rewriting, which generates observation-aligned rewritten instructions by requiring LLMs to reason the difference between original and new observations. We further develop a mixing-then-focusing training strategy with a random observation cropping scheme, effectively enhancing data distribution diversity while suppressing augmentation data noise during training. Experiments on both the discrete environments (R2R, REVERIE, and R4R datasets) and continuous environments (R2R-CE dataset) show the superior performance and impressive generalization ability of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/SaDil13/VLN-RAM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_18065
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unseen from Seen: Rewriting Observation-Instruction Using Foundation Models for Augmenting Vision-Language Navigation
Wei, Ziming
Lin, Bingqian
Nie, Yunshuang
Chen, Jiaqi
Ma, Shikui
Xu, Hang
Liang, Xiaodan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Robotics
Data scarcity is a long-standing challenge in the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) field, which extremely hinders the generalization of agents to unseen environments. Previous works primarily rely on additional simulator data or web-collected images/videos to improve the generalization. However, the simulator environments still face limited diversity, and the web-collected data often requires extensive labor to remove the noise. In this paper, we propose a Rewriting-driven AugMentation (RAM) paradigm for VLN, which directly creates the unseen observation-instruction pairs via rewriting human-annotated training data. Benefiting from our rewriting mechanism, new observation-instruction pairs can be obtained in both simulator-free and labor-saving manners to promote generalization. Specifically, we first introduce Object-Enriched Observation Rewriting, where we combine Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive rewritten object-enriched scene descriptions, enabling observation synthesis with diverse objects and spatial layouts via Text-to-Image Generation Models (T2IMs). Then, we propose Observation-Contrast Instruction Rewriting, which generates observation-aligned rewritten instructions by requiring LLMs to reason the difference between original and new observations. We further develop a mixing-then-focusing training strategy with a random observation cropping scheme, effectively enhancing data distribution diversity while suppressing augmentation data noise during training. Experiments on both the discrete environments (R2R, REVERIE, and R4R datasets) and continuous environments (R2R-CE dataset) show the superior performance and impressive generalization ability of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/SaDil13/VLN-RAM.
title Unseen from Seen: Rewriting Observation-Instruction Using Foundation Models for Augmenting Vision-Language Navigation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18065