# Layout-aware Dreamer for Embodied Referring Expression Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.00171 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00171/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (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)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10638/) (2020)
- [Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11742/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Episodic Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06453/) (2021)
- [FILM: Following Instructions in Language with Modular Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07342/) (2021)
- [SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17138/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16986/) (2023)
- [GridMM: Grid Memory Map for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12907/) (2023)
- [ESceme: Vision-and-Language Navigation with Episodic Scene Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01032/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we study the problem of Embodied Referring Expression Grounding, where an agent needs to navigate in a previously unseen environment and localize a remote object described by a concise high-level natural language instruction. When facing such a situation, a human tends to imagine what the destination may look like and to explore the environment based on prior knowledge of the environmental layout, such as the fact that a bathroom is more likely to be found near a bedroom than a kitchen. We have designed an autonomous agent called Layout-aware Dreamer (LAD), including two novel modules, that is, the Layout Learner and the Goal Dreamer to mimic this cognitive decision process. The Layout Learner learns to infer the room category distribution of neighboring unexplored areas along the path for coarse layout estimation, which effectively introduces layout common sense of room-to-room transitions to our agent. To learn an effective exploration of the environment, the Goal Dreamer imagines the destination beforehand. Our agent achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the public leaderboard of the REVERIE dataset in challenging unseen test environments with improvement in navigation success (SR) by 4.02% and remote grounding success (RGS) by 3.43% compared to the previous state-of-the-art. The code is released at https://github.com/zehao-wang/LAD