mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions

arXiv 2203.12667 ↗First posted 22 Mar 2022cs.CV cs.AI cs.CLcited by 116

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Abstract (arXiv)

A long-term goal of AI research is to build intelligent agents that can communicate with humans in natural language, perceive the environment, and perform real-world tasks. Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a fundamental and interdisciplinary research topic towards this goal, and receives increasing attention from natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, and machine learning communities. In this paper, we review contemporary studies in the emerging field of VLN, covering tasks, evaluation metrics, methods, etc. Through structured analysis of current progress and challenges, we highlight the limitations of current VLN and opportunities for future work. This paper serves as a thorough reference for the VLN research community.

Key facts. Cited by 116 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 105 of its 141 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2022.

Builds on

105 of 141 references.

References · 105

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  3. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
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  12. 2018On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agentscited by 526
38 more
  1. 2021Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitatcited by 501
  2. 2018Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agentscited by 477
  3. 2016Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Imagecited by 468
  4. 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 429
  5. 2020Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Groundingcited by 401
  6. 2019DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Framescited by 352
  7. 2016Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 351
  8. 2018Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 337
  9. 2017Embodied Question Answeringcited by 335
  10. 2019REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environmentscited by 330
  11. 2018Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 304
  12. 2020A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigationcited by 300
  13. 2021History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 268
  14. 2019Vision-and-Dialog Navigationcited by 246
  15. 2019Learning to Navigate Unseen Environments: Back Translation with Environmental Dropoutcited by 241
  16. 2018Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environmentscited by 238
  17. 2020Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-trainingcited by 228
  18. 2021TEACh: Task-driven Embodied Agents that Chatcited by 194
  19. 2019Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Taskscited by 177
  20. 2020Improving Vision-and-Language Navigation with Image-Text Pairs from the Webcited by 177
  21. 2019Self-Monitoring Navigation Agent via Auxiliary Progress Estimationcited by 173
  22. 2021Episodic Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 155
  23. 2017IQA: Visual Question Answering in Interactive Environmentscited by 154
  24. 2019Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 129
  25. 2021Airbert: In-domain Pretraining for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 129
  26. 2021Waypoint Models for Instruction-guided Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 125
  27. 2021SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Explorationcited by 118
  28. 2021Pathdreamer: A World Model for Indoor Navigationcited by 117
  29. 2020Topological Planning with Transformers for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 115
  30. 2018Building Generalizable Agents with a Realistic and Rich 3D Environmentcited by 109
  31. 2019The Regretful Agent: Heuristic-Aided Navigation through Progress Estimationcited by 104
  32. 2018Learning to Navigate in Cities Without a Mapcited by 103
  33. 2019Embodied Question Answering in Photorealistic Environments with Point Cloud Perceptioncited by 103
  34. 2019General Evaluation for Instruction Conditioned Navigation using Dynamic Time Warpingcited by 102
  35. 2018Mapping Instructions to Actions in 3D Environments with Visual Goal Predictioncited by 101
  36. 2019Help, Anna! Visual Navigation with Natural Multimodal Assistance via Retrospective Curiosity-Encouraging Imitation Learningcited by 100
  37. 2020Language and Visual Entity Relationship Graph for Agent Navigationcited by 100
  38. 2021Structured Scene Memory for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 95

50 most cited of 105 All 105 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 12; 2023: 16; 2024: 28; 2025: 33; 2026: 27.

116 papers.

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  1. 2022LLM-Planner: Few-Shot Grounded Planning for Embodied Agents with Large Language Modelscited by 459
  2. 2022LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Actioncited by 435
  3. 2023NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Modelscited by 274
  4. 2024NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 222
  5. 2023Large-scale Multi-Modal Pre-trained Models: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 153
  6. 2023Large Language Models for Robotics: A Surveycited by 132
  7. 2022Vision-Language Pre-training: Basics, Recent Advances, and Future Trendscited by 117
  8. 2022BEVBert: Multimodal Map Pre-training for Language-guided Navigationcited by 117
  9. 2025Visual Planning: Let's Think Only with Imagescited by 85
  10. 2024Mobility VLA: Multimodal Instruction Navigation with Long-Context VLMs and Topological Graphscited by 72
  11. 2022VLMbench: A Compositional Benchmark for Vision-and-Language Manipulationcited by 68
  12. 2024OpenFMNav: Towards Open-Set Zero-Shot Object Navigation via Vision-Language Foundation Modelscited by 66
38 more
  1. 2024Towards Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark and Methodcited by 66
  2. 2024Demystifying Chains, Trees, and Graphs of Thoughtscited by 63
  3. 2024Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 63
  4. 2025SpatialLM: Training Large Language Models for Structured Indoor Modelingcited by 63
  5. 2022CLIP-Nav: Using CLIP for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 55
  6. 2024Embodied-RAG: General Non-parametric Embodied Memory for Retrieval and Generationcited by 44
  7. 2024When LLMs step into the 3D World: A Survey and Meta-Analysis of 3D Tasks via Multi-modal Large Language Modelscited by 41
  8. 2022Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 34
  9. 2025OmniVLA: An Omni-Modal Vision-Language-Action Model for Robot Navigationcited by 34
  10. 2024InferCept: Efficient Intercept Support for Augmented Large Language Model Inferencecited by 32
  11. 2024VisionGraph: Leveraging Large Multimodal Models for Graph Theory Problems in Visual Contextcited by 29
  12. 2025CAST: Counterfactual Labels Improve Instruction Following in Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 28
  13. 2024SPARTUN3D: Situated Spatial Understanding of 3D World in Large Language Modelscited by 26
  14. 2025SITE: towards Spatial Intelligence Thorough Evaluationcited by 26
  15. 2023VLN-Trans: Translator for the Vision and Language Navigation Agentcited by 25
  16. 2023Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 25
  17. 2024Perceive, Reflect, and Plan: Designing LLM Agent for Goal-Directed City Navigation without Instructionscited by 25
  18. 20253D Scene Generation: A Surveycited by 24
  19. 2023Zero-shot Referring Expression Comprehension via Structural Similarity Between Images and Captionscited by 21
  20. 2024Human-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation: Bridging Simulation to Reality with Dynamic Human Interactionscited by 18
  21. 2024Space3D-Bench: Spatial 3D Question Answering Benchmarkcited by 17
  22. 2025FlexVLN: Flexible Adaptation for Diverse Vision-and-Language Navigation Taskscited by 16
  23. 2025DreamNav: A Trajectory-Based Imaginative Framework for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 15
  24. 2023RREx-BoT: Remote Referring Expressions with a Bag of Trickscited by 12
  25. 2023Dialogue Games for Benchmarking Language Understanding: Motivation, Taxonomy, Strategycited by 12
  26. 2025COSMO: Combination of Selective Memorization for Low-cost Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 12
  27. 2024Mind the Error! Detection and Localization of Instruction Errors in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 11
  28. 2025Neural Brain: A Neuroscience-inspired Framework for Embodied Agentscited by 10
  29. 2023MAEA: Multimodal Attribution for Embodied AIcited by 9
  30. 2022FedVLN: Privacy-preserving Federated Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 8
  31. 2022DOROTHIE: Spoken Dialogue for Handling Unexpected Situations in Interactive Autonomous Driving Agentscited by 8
  32. 2023Behavioral Analysis of Vision-and-Language Navigation Agentscited by 8
  33. 2025VLN-Zero: Rapid Exploration and Cache-Enabled Neurosymbolic Vision-Language Planning for Zero-Shot Transfer in Robot Navigationcited by 8
  34. 2023Multimodal Diffusion Segmentation Model for Object Segmentation from Manipulation Instructionscited by 7
  35. 2025Active Test-time Vision-Language Navigationcited by 7
  36. 2023TG-VQA: Ternary Game of Video Question Answeringcited by 6
  37. 2023Chain-of-Symbol Prompting Elicits Planning in Large Langauge Modelscited by 6
  38. 2024Evaluating Vision-Language Models as Evaluators in Path Planningcited by 6

50 most cited of 116 All 116 (JSON)