LatentPilot: Scene-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation by Dreaming Ahead with Latent Visual Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hao, Haihong, Chen, Lei, Han, Mingfei, Li, Changlin, An, Dong, Yang, Yuqiang, Li, Zhihui, Chang, Xiaojun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hao, Haihong
Chen, Lei
Han, Mingfei
Li, Changlin
An, Dong
Yang, Yuqiang
Li, Zhihui
Chang, Xiaojun
author_facet Hao, Haihong
Chen, Lei
Han, Mingfei
Li, Changlin
An, Dong
Yang, Yuqiang
Li, Zhihui
Chang, Xiaojun
contents Existing vision-and-language navigation (VLN) models primarily reason over past and current visual observations, while largely ignoring the future visual dynamics induced by actions. As a result, they often lack an effective understanding of the causal relationship between actions and how the visual world changes, limiting robust decision-making. Humans, in contrast, can imagine the near future by leveraging action-dynamics causality, which improves both environmental understanding and navigation choices. Inspired by this capability, we propose LatentPilot, a new paradigm that exploits future observations during training as a valuable data source to learn action-conditioned visual dynamics, while requiring no access to future frames at inference. Concretely, we propose a flywheel-style training mechanism that iteratively collects on-policy trajectories and retrains the model to better match the agent's behavior distribution, with an expert takeover triggered when the agent deviates excessively. LatentPilot further learns visual latent tokens without explicit supervision; these latent tokens attend globally in a continuous latent space and are carried across steps, serving as both the current output and the next input, thereby enabling the agent to dream ahead and reason about how actions will affect subsequent observations. Experiments on R2R-CE, RxR-CE, and R2R-PE benchmarks achieve new SOTA results, and real-robot tests across diverse environments demonstrate LatentPilot's superior understanding of environment-action dynamics in scene. Project page:https://abdd.top/latentpilot/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_29165
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LatentPilot: Scene-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation by Dreaming Ahead with Latent Visual Reasoning
Hao, Haihong
Chen, Lei
Han, Mingfei
Li, Changlin
An, Dong
Yang, Yuqiang
Li, Zhihui
Chang, Xiaojun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Existing vision-and-language navigation (VLN) models primarily reason over past and current visual observations, while largely ignoring the future visual dynamics induced by actions. As a result, they often lack an effective understanding of the causal relationship between actions and how the visual world changes, limiting robust decision-making. Humans, in contrast, can imagine the near future by leveraging action-dynamics causality, which improves both environmental understanding and navigation choices. Inspired by this capability, we propose LatentPilot, a new paradigm that exploits future observations during training as a valuable data source to learn action-conditioned visual dynamics, while requiring no access to future frames at inference. Concretely, we propose a flywheel-style training mechanism that iteratively collects on-policy trajectories and retrains the model to better match the agent's behavior distribution, with an expert takeover triggered when the agent deviates excessively. LatentPilot further learns visual latent tokens without explicit supervision; these latent tokens attend globally in a continuous latent space and are carried across steps, serving as both the current output and the next input, thereby enabling the agent to dream ahead and reason about how actions will affect subsequent observations. Experiments on R2R-CE, RxR-CE, and R2R-PE benchmarks achieve new SOTA results, and real-robot tests across diverse environments demonstrate LatentPilot's superior understanding of environment-action dynamics in scene. Project page:https://abdd.top/latentpilot/
title LatentPilot: Scene-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation by Dreaming Ahead with Latent Visual Reasoning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29165