# Scene-Intuitive Agent for Remote Embodied Visual Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12944 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12944/

## Key facts

- Cited by 49 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05397/) (2016)
- [Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02724/) (2018)
- [Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11543/) (2017)
- [REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10151/) (2019)
- [12-in-1: Multi-Task Vision and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02315/) (2019)
- [Learning to Navigate Unseen Environments: Back Translation with Environmental Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04195/) (2019)
- [Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12354/) (2018)
- [Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10638/) (2020)
- [Cognitive Mapping and Planning for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03920/) (2017)
- [Semi-parametric Topological Memory for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00653/) (2018)
- [Learning to Navigate in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03673/) (2016)
- [Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07883/) (2019)
- [Improving Vision-and-Language Navigation with Image-Text Pairs from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14973/) (2020)
- [Self-Monitoring Navigation Agent via Auxiliary Progress Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03035/) (2019)
- [Building Generalizable Agents with a Realistic and Rich 3D Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02209/) (2018)
- [Scene Memory Transformer for Embodied Agents in Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03878/) (2019)
- [Neural Map: Structured Memory for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08360/) (2017)
- [Improving Referring Expression Grounding with Cross-modal Attention-guided Erasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00839/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13309/) (2021)
- [Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11742/) (2022)
- [BEVBert: Multimodal Map Pre-training for Language-guided Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04385/) (2022)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12667/) (2022)
- [Scaling Data Generation in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15644/) (2023)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07035/) (2024)
- [Bird's-Eye-View Scene Graph for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04758/) (2023)
- [Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14158/) (2024)
- [Target-Driven Structured Transformer Planner for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11201/) (2022)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation via Causal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10241/) (2024)
- [Learning from Unlabeled 3D Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11781/) (2022)
- [Constraint-Aware Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10137/) (2024)
- [Learning Vision-and-Language Navigation from YouTube Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11984/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Navigation: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11544/) (2021)
- [Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13209/) (2023)
- [Causal Reasoning Meets Visual Representation Learning: A Prospective Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12037/) (2022)
- [GeoVLN: Learning Geometry-Enhanced Visual Representation with Slot Attention for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17102/) (2023)
- [Meta-Explore: Exploratory Hierarchical Vision-and-Language Navigation Using Scene Object Spectrum Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04077/) (2023)
- [A Dual Semantic-Aware Recurrent Global-Adaptive Network For Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03602/) (2023)
- [Correctable Landmark Discovery via Large Models for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18721/) (2024)
- [SAME: Learning Generic Language-Guided Visual Navigation with State-Adaptive Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05552/) (2024)
- [DOPE: Dual Object Perception-Enhancement Network for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00743/) (2025)
- [RREx-BoT: Remote Referring Expressions with a Bag of Tricks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12614/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Navigation with Embodied Intelligence: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14304/) (2024)
- [Multiple Thinking Achieving Meta-Ability Decoupling for Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01520/) (2023)
- [Planning from Imagination: Episodic Simulation and Episodic Memory for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01857/) (2024)
- [Unseen from Seen: Rewriting Observation-Instruction Using Foundation Models for Augmenting Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18065/) (2025)
- [Embodied Referring Expression for Manipulation Question Answering in Interactive Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02709/) (2022)
- [Augmented Commonsense Knowledge for Remote Object Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01256/) (2024)
- [PanoGen++: Domain-Adapted Text-Guided Panoramic Environment Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09938/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans learn from life events to form intuitions towards the understanding of visual environments and languages. Envision that you are instructed by a high-level instruction, "Go to the bathroom in the master bedroom and replace the blue towel on the left wall", what would you possibly do to carry out the task? Intuitively, we comprehend the semantics of the instruction to form an overview of where a bathroom is and what a blue towel is in mind; then, we navigate to the target location by consistently matching the bathroom appearance in mind with the current scene. In this paper, we present an agent that mimics such human behaviors. Specifically, we focus on the Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments task, called REVERIE, where an agent is asked to correctly localize a remote target object specified by a concise high-level natural language instruction, and propose a two-stage training pipeline. In the first stage, we pretrain the agent with two cross-modal alignment sub-tasks, namely the Scene Grounding task and the Object Grounding task. The agent learns where to stop in the Scene Grounding task and what to attend to in the Object Grounding task respectively. Then, to generate action sequences, we propose a memory-augmented attentive action decoder to smoothly fuse the pre-trained vision and language representations with the agent's past memory experiences. Without bells and whistles, experimental results show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art(SOTA) significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.