Aux-Think: Exploring Reasoning Strategies for Data-Efficient Vision-Language Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Wang, Shuo, Wang, Yongcai, Li, Wanting, Cai, Xudong, Wang, Yucheng, Chen, Maiyue, Wang, Kaihui, Su, Zhizhong, Li, Deying, Fan, Zhaoxin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866908590451720192
author Wang, Shuo
Wang, Yongcai
Li, Wanting
Cai, Xudong
Wang, Yucheng
Chen, Maiyue
Wang, Kaihui
Su, Zhizhong
Li, Deying
Fan, Zhaoxin
author_facet Wang, Shuo
Wang, Yongcai
Li, Wanting
Cai, Xudong
Wang, Yucheng
Chen, Maiyue
Wang, Kaihui
Su, Zhizhong
Li, Deying
Fan, Zhaoxin
contents Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) is a critical task for developing embodied agents that can follow natural language instructions to navigate in complex real-world environments. Recent advances in VLN by large pretrained models have significantly improved generalization and instruction grounding compared to traditional approaches. However, the role of reasoning strategies in navigation-an action-centric, long-horizon task-remains underexplored, despite Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning's demonstrated success in static tasks like visual question answering. To address this gap, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of reasoning strategies for VLN, including No-Think (direct action prediction), Pre-Think (reason before action), and Post-Think (reason after action). Surprisingly, our findings reveal the Inference-time Reasoning Collapse issue, where inference-time reasoning degrades navigation accuracy, highlighting the challenges of integrating reasoning into VLN. Based on this insight, we propose Aux-Think, a framework that trains models to internalize structured reasoning patterns through CoT supervision, while inferring action directly without reasoning in online prediction. To support this framework, we release R2R-CoT-320k, the first Chain-of-Thought annotated dataset for VLN. Extensive experiments show that Aux-Think reduces training effort greatly and achieves the best performance under the same data scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_11886
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aux-Think: Exploring Reasoning Strategies for Data-Efficient Vision-Language Navigation
Wang, Shuo
Wang, Yongcai
Li, Wanting
Cai, Xudong
Wang, Yucheng
Chen, Maiyue
Wang, Kaihui
Su, Zhizhong
Li, Deying
Fan, Zhaoxin
Robotics
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) is a critical task for developing embodied agents that can follow natural language instructions to navigate in complex real-world environments. Recent advances in VLN by large pretrained models have significantly improved generalization and instruction grounding compared to traditional approaches. However, the role of reasoning strategies in navigation-an action-centric, long-horizon task-remains underexplored, despite Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning's demonstrated success in static tasks like visual question answering. To address this gap, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of reasoning strategies for VLN, including No-Think (direct action prediction), Pre-Think (reason before action), and Post-Think (reason after action). Surprisingly, our findings reveal the Inference-time Reasoning Collapse issue, where inference-time reasoning degrades navigation accuracy, highlighting the challenges of integrating reasoning into VLN. Based on this insight, we propose Aux-Think, a framework that trains models to internalize structured reasoning patterns through CoT supervision, while inferring action directly without reasoning in online prediction. To support this framework, we release R2R-CoT-320k, the first Chain-of-Thought annotated dataset for VLN. Extensive experiments show that Aux-Think reduces training effort greatly and achieves the best performance under the same data scale.
title Aux-Think: Exploring Reasoning Strategies for Data-Efficient Vision-Language Navigation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11886