# KERM: Knowledge Enhanced Reasoning for Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15796 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15796/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07883/) (2019)
- [Airbert: In-domain Pretraining for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09105/) (2021)
- [SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17138/) (2021)
- [Language and Visual Entity Relationship Graph for Agent Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09304/) (2020)
- [Structured Scene Memory for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03454/) (2021)
- [K-LITE: Learning Transferable Visual Models with External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09222/) (2022)
- [Object-and-Action Aware Model for Visual Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14626/) (2020)
- [HOP: History-and-Order Aware Pre-training for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11591/) (2022)
- [The Road to Know-Where: An Object-and-Room Informed Sequential BERT for Indoor Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04167/) (2021)
- [SOAT: A Scene- and Object-Aware Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14143/) (2021)
- [Neighbor-view Enhanced Model for Vision and Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07201/) (2021)
- [Learning from Unlabeled 3D Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11781/) (2022)
- [Diagnosing Vision-and-Language Navigation: What Really Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16561/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Towards Learning a Generalist Model for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02010/) (2023)
- [GridMM: Grid Memory Map for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12907/) (2023)
- [NavGPT-2: Unleashing Navigational Reasoning Capability for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12366/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18794/) (2024)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer via 3D Feature Fields for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09798/) (2024)
- [Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13209/) (2023)
- [Bootstrapping Language-Guided Navigation Learning with Self-Refining Data Flywheel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08467/) (2024)
- [OVER-NAV: Elevating Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation with Open-Vocabulary Detection and StructurEd Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17334/) (2024)
- [Correctable Landmark Discovery via Large Models for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18721/) (2024)
- [FlexVLN: Flexible Adaptation for Diverse Vision-and-Language Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13966/) (2025)
- [Cross from Left to Right Brain: Adaptive Text Dreamer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20897/) (2025)
- [COSMO: Combination of Selective Memorization for Low-cost Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24065/) (2025)
- [Unseen from Seen: Rewriting Observation-Instruction Using Foundation Models for Augmenting Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18065/) (2025)
- [Augmented Commonsense Knowledge for Remote Object Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01256/) (2024)
- [MAGIC: Meta-Ability Guided Interactive Chain-of-Distillation for Effective-and-Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17960/) (2024)
- [MiniVLN: Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation by Progressive Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18800/) (2024)
- [NavQ: Learning a Q-Model for Foresighted Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16457/) (2025)
- [STRIDER: Navigation via Instruction-Aligned Structural Decision Space Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00033/) (2025)
- [Generating Vision-Language Navigation Instructions Incorporated Fine-Grained Alignment Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08566/) (2025)
- [Trajectory-Diversity-Driven Robust Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15370/) (2026)
- [Weakly-supervised VLM-guided Partial Contrastive Learning for Visual Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15757/) (2025)
- [DAgger Diffusion Navigation: DAgger Boosted Diffusion Policy for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09444/) (2025)
- [Mem4Nav: Boosting Vision-and-Language Navigation in Urban Environments with a Hierarchical Spatial-Cognition Long-Short Memory System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19433/) (2025)
- [LookasideVLN: Direction-Aware Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17190/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Spatial Proximity Reasoning for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11541/) (2024)
- [AIGeN: An Adversarial Approach for Instruction Generation in VLN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10054/) (2024)
- [NaVIP: An Image-Centric Indoor Navigation Solution for Visually Impaired People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18109/) (2024)
- [World-Consistent Data Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06413/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is the task to enable an embodied agent to navigate to a remote location following the natural language instruction in real scenes. Most of the previous approaches utilize the entire features or object-centric features to represent navigable candidates. However, these representations are not efficient enough for an agent to perform actions to arrive the target location. As knowledge provides crucial information which is complementary to visible content, in this paper, we propose a Knowledge Enhanced Reasoning Model (KERM) to leverage knowledge to improve agent navigation ability. Specifically, we first retrieve facts (i.e., knowledge described by language descriptions) for the navigation views based on local regions from the constructed knowledge base. The retrieved facts range from properties of a single object (e.g., color, shape) to relationships between objects (e.g., action, spatial position), providing crucial information for VLN. We further present the KERM which contains the purification, fact-aware interaction, and instruction-guided aggregation modules to integrate visual, history, instruction, and fact features. The proposed KERM can automatically select and gather crucial and relevant cues, obtaining more accurate action prediction. Experimental results on the REVERIE, R2R, and SOON datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.