WalkGPT: Grounded Vision-Language Conversation with Depth-Aware Segmentation for Pedestrian Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sultan, Rafi Ibn, Zhu, Hui, Zhou, Xiangyu, Li, Chengyin, Khanduri, Prashant, Brocanelli, Marco, Zhu, Dongxiao
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Sultan, Rafi Ibn
Zhu, Hui
Zhou, Xiangyu
Li, Chengyin
Khanduri, Prashant
Brocanelli, Marco
Zhu, Dongxiao
author_facet Sultan, Rafi Ibn
Zhu, Hui
Zhou, Xiangyu
Li, Chengyin
Khanduri, Prashant
Brocanelli, Marco
Zhu, Dongxiao
contents Ensuring accessible pedestrian navigation requires reasoning about both semantic and spatial aspects of complex urban scenes, a challenge that existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) struggle to meet. Although these models can describe visual content, their lack of explicit grounding leads to object hallucinations and unreliable depth reasoning, limiting their usefulness for accessibility guidance. We introduce WalkGPT, a pixel-grounded LVLM for the new task of Grounded Navigation Guide, unifying language reasoning and segmentation within a single architecture for depth-aware accessibility guidance. Given a pedestrian-view image and a navigation query, WalkGPT generates a conversational response with segmentation masks that delineate accessible and harmful features, along with relative depth estimation. The model incorporates a Multi-Scale Query Projector (MSQP) that shapes the final image tokens by aggregating them along text tokens across spatial hierarchies, and a Calibrated Text Projector (CTP), guided by a proposed Region Alignment Loss, that maps language embeddings into segmentation-aware representations. These components enable fine-grained grounding and depth inference without user-provided cues or anchor points, allowing the model to generate complete and realistic navigation guidance. We also introduce PAVE, a large-scale benchmark of 41k pedestrian-view images paired with accessibility-aware questions and depth-grounded answers. Experiments show that WalkGPT achieves strong grounded reasoning and segmentation performance. The source code and dataset are available on the \href{https://sites.google.com/view/walkgpt-26/home}{project website}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_10703
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WalkGPT: Grounded Vision-Language Conversation with Depth-Aware Segmentation for Pedestrian Navigation
Sultan, Rafi Ibn
Zhu, Hui
Zhou, Xiangyu
Li, Chengyin
Khanduri, Prashant
Brocanelli, Marco
Zhu, Dongxiao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
Ensuring accessible pedestrian navigation requires reasoning about both semantic and spatial aspects of complex urban scenes, a challenge that existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) struggle to meet. Although these models can describe visual content, their lack of explicit grounding leads to object hallucinations and unreliable depth reasoning, limiting their usefulness for accessibility guidance. We introduce WalkGPT, a pixel-grounded LVLM for the new task of Grounded Navigation Guide, unifying language reasoning and segmentation within a single architecture for depth-aware accessibility guidance. Given a pedestrian-view image and a navigation query, WalkGPT generates a conversational response with segmentation masks that delineate accessible and harmful features, along with relative depth estimation. The model incorporates a Multi-Scale Query Projector (MSQP) that shapes the final image tokens by aggregating them along text tokens across spatial hierarchies, and a Calibrated Text Projector (CTP), guided by a proposed Region Alignment Loss, that maps language embeddings into segmentation-aware representations. These components enable fine-grained grounding and depth inference without user-provided cues or anchor points, allowing the model to generate complete and realistic navigation guidance. We also introduce PAVE, a large-scale benchmark of 41k pedestrian-view images paired with accessibility-aware questions and depth-grounded answers. Experiments show that WalkGPT achieves strong grounded reasoning and segmentation performance. The source code and dataset are available on the \href{https://sites.google.com/view/walkgpt-26/home}{project website}.
title WalkGPT: Grounded Vision-Language Conversation with Depth-Aware Segmentation for Pedestrian Navigation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10703