# Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.11742 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11742/

## Key facts

- Cited by 193 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Learning to Explore using Active Neural SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05155/) (2020)
- [Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10092/) (2018)
- [A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13922/) (2020)
- [History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13309/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/) (2020)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 193)

- [NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16986/) (2023)
- [NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15852/) (2024)
- [ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03047/) (2023)
- [GridMM: Grid Memory Map for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12907/) (2023)
- [Language Conditioned Spatial Relation Reasoning for 3D Object Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09646/) (2022)
- [BEVBert: Multimodal Map Pre-training for Language-guided Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04385/) (2022)
- [AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06735/) (2023)
- [StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05240/) (2025)
- [Scaling Data Generation in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15644/) (2023)
- [Discuss Before Moving: Visual Language Navigation via Multi-expert Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11382/) (2023)
- [NavGPT-2: Unleashing Navigational Reasoning Capability for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12366/) (2024)
- [MapGPT: Map-Guided Prompting with Adaptive Path Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07314/) (2024)
- [DREAMWALKER: Mental Planning for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07498/) (2023)
- [NavCoT: Boosting LLM-Based Vision-and-Language Navigation via Learning Disentangled Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07376/) (2024)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07035/) (2024)
- [PanoGen: Text-Conditioned Panoramic Environment Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19195/) (2023)
- [Can an Embodied Agent Find Your "Cat-shaped Mug"? LLM-Guided Exploration for Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03480/) (2023)
- [Bird's-Eye-View Scene Graph for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04758/) (2023)
- [Lookahead Exploration with Neural Radiance Representation for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01943/) (2024)
- [Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14158/) (2024)
- [A2Nav: Action-Aware Zero-Shot Robot Navigation by Exploiting Vision-and-Language Ability of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07997/) (2023)
- [Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18794/) (2024)
- [A New Path: Scaling Vision-and-Language Navigation with Synthetic Instructions and Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03112/) (2022)
- [Target-Driven Structured Transformer Planner for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11201/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks and Graph Transformers in Computer Vision: A Task-Oriented Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13232/) (2022)
- [CLIP-Nav: Using CLIP for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16649/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Following language instructions to navigate in unseen environments is a challenging problem for autonomous embodied agents. The agent not only needs to ground languages in visual scenes, but also should explore the environment to reach its target. In this work, we propose a dual-scale graph transformer (DUET) for joint long-term action planning and fine-grained cross-modal understanding. We build a topological map on-the-fly to enable efficient exploration in global action space. To balance the complexity of large action space reasoning and fine-grained language grounding, we dynamically combine a fine-scale encoding over local observations and a coarse-scale encoding on a global map via graph transformers. The proposed approach, DUET, significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on goal-oriented vision-and-language navigation (VLN) benchmarks REVERIE and SOON. It also improves the success rate on the fine-grained VLN benchmark R2R.