# Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (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)
- [REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10151/) (2019)
- [Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10092/) (2018)
- [History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13309/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Dialog Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04957/) (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)
- [Kimera: an Open-Source Library for Real-Time Metric-Semantic Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02490/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02764/) (2022)
- [Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12255/) (2019)
- [Waypoint Models for Instruction-guided Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02207/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12667/) (2022)
- [Topological Planning with Transformers for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05292/) (2020)
- [General Evaluation for Instruction Conditioned Navigation using Dynamic Time Warping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05446/) (2019)
- [Embodied Question Answering in Photorealistic Environments with Point Cloud Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03461/) (2019)
- [Visual Room Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16544/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15852/) (2024)
- [Scaling Data Generation in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15644/) (2023)
- [ReMEmbR: Building and Reasoning Over Long-Horizon Spatio-Temporal Memory for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13682/) (2024)
- [Towards Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09082/) (2024)
- [CityNav: A Large-Scale Dataset for Real-World Aerial Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14240/) (2024)
- [OctoNav: Towards Generalist Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09839/) (2025)
- [VLNVerse: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Navigation with Versatile, Embodied, Realistic Simulation and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19021/) (2025)
- [OVER-NAV: Elevating Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation with Open-Vocabulary Detection and StructurEd Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17334/) (2024)
- [Towards Physically Executable 3D Gaussian for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21307/) (2025)
- [Instance-aware Exploration-Verification-Exploitation for Instance ImageGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17587/) (2024)
- [RREx-BoT: Remote Referring Expressions with a Bag of Tricks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12614/) (2023)
- [Malicious Path Manipulations via Exploitation of Representation Vulnerabilities of Vision-Language Navigation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07392/) (2024)
- [ESceme: Vision-and-Language Navigation with Episodic Scene Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01032/) (2023)
- [Why Only Text: Empowering Vision-and-Language Navigation with Multi-modal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02208/) (2024)
- [Tell Me Where You Are: Multimodal LLMs Meet Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17520/) (2024)
- [NavQ: Learning a Q-Model for Foresighted Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16457/) (2025)
- [Learning-Augmented Model-Based Planning for Visual Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07898/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Instruction-aware Embodied Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20710/) (2025)
- [Dream to Recall: Imagination-Guided Experience Retrieval for Memory-Persistent Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08553/) (2025)
- [FSD-VLN: Fast-Slow Dual-System Modeling for Aerial Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08359/) (2026)
- [Comparison of Model-Free and Model-Based Learning-Informed Planning for PointGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08801/) (2022)
- [Continual Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15049/) (2024)
- [NaVIP: An Image-Centric Indoor Navigation Solution for Visually Impaired People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18109/) (2024)
- [All-day Multi-scenes Lifelong Vision-and-Language Navigation with Tucker Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14276/) (2026)
- [IVLMap: Instance-Aware Visual Language Grounding for Consumer Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19336/) (2024)
- [The Wallpaper is Ugly: Indoor Localization using Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03900/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Semantic-Augmented Navigation: Optimal Transport and Graph-Driven Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01565/) (2026)
- [A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09792/) (2026)
- [Towards Open Environments and Instructions: General Vision-Language Navigation via Fast-Slow Interactive Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09111/) (2026)
- [VLN-Pilot: Large Vision-Language Model as an Autonomous Indoor Drone Operator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05552/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation (IVLN), a paradigm for evaluating language-guided agents navigating in a persistent environment over time. Existing Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks erase the agent's memory at the beginning of every episode, testing the ability to perform cold-start navigation with no prior information. However, deployed robots occupy the same environment for long periods of time. The IVLN paradigm addresses this disparity by training and evaluating VLN agents that maintain memory across tours of scenes that consist of up to 100 ordered instruction-following Room-to-Room (R2R) episodes, each defined by an individual language instruction and a target path. We present discrete and continuous Iterative Room-to-Room (IR2R) benchmarks comprising about 400 tours each in 80 indoor scenes. We find that extending the implicit memory of high-performing transformer VLN agents is not sufficient for IVLN, but agents that build maps can benefit from environment persistence, motivating a renewed focus on map-building agents in VLN.