# Bird's-Eye-View Scene Graph for Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04758 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04758/

## Key facts

- Cited by 72 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 113 of its 143 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 113)

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [DETR3D: 3D Object Detection from Multi-view Images via 3D-to-2D Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06922/) (2021)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [PETR: Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05625/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [NavGPT-2: Unleashing Navigational Reasoning Capability for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12366/) (2024)
- [DREAMWALKER: Mental Planning for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07498/) (2023)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07035/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DoraemonGPT: Toward Understanding Dynamic Scenes with Large Language Models (Exemplified as A Video Agent)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08392/) (2024)
- [IS-Fusion: Instance-Scene Collaborative Fusion for Multimodal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15241/) (2024)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation via Causal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10241/) (2024)
- [GaussNav: Gaussian Splatting for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11625/) (2024)
- [OctoNav: Towards Generalist Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09839/) (2025)
- [Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13209/) (2023)
- [NavBench: Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01031/) (2025)
- [Dynam3D: Dynamic Layered 3D Tokens Empower VLM for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11383/) (2025)
- [Psychometry: An Omnifit Model for Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20022/) (2024)
- [g3D-LF: Generalizable 3D-Language Feature Fields for Embodied Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17030/) (2024)
- [Controllable Navigation Instruction Generation with Chain of Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07433/) (2024)
- [Navigation Instruction Generation with BEV Perception and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15087/) (2024)
- [Bootstrapping Language-Guided Navigation Learning with Self-Refining Data Flywheel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08467/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Navigation with Energy-Based Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14250/) (2024)
- [NavRAG: Generating User Demand Instructions for Embodied Navigation through Retrieval-Augmented LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11142/) (2025)
- [SAME: Learning Generic Language-Guided Visual Navigation with State-Adaptive Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05552/) (2024)
- [MonoDream: Monocular Vision-Language Navigation with Panoramic Dreaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02549/) (2025)
- [COSMO: Combination of Selective Memorization for Low-cost Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24065/) (2025)
- [DOPE: Dual Object Perception-Enhancement Network for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00743/) (2025)
- [Loc4Plan: Locating Before Planning for Outdoor Vision and Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05090/) (2024)
- [DIFFVSGG: Diffusion-Driven Online Video Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13957/) (2025)
- [Hydra-SGG: Hybrid Relation Assignment for One-stage Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10262/) (2024)
- [Holistic Physics Solver: Learning PDEs in a Unified Spectral-Physical Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11382/) (2024)
- [GC-VLN: Instruction as Graph Constraints for Training-free Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10454/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language navigation (VLN), which entails an agent to navigate 3D environments following human instructions, has shown great advances. However, current agents are built upon panoramic observations, which hinders their ability to perceive 3D scene geometry and easily leads to ambiguous selection of panoramic view. To address these limitations, we present a BEV Scene Graph (BSG), which leverages multi-step BEV representations to encode scene layouts and geometric cues of indoor environment under the supervision of 3D detection. During navigation, BSG builds a local BEV representation at each step and maintains a BEV-based global scene map, which stores and organizes all the online collected local BEV representations according to their topological relations. Based on BSG, the agent predicts a local BEV grid-level decision score and a global graph-level decision score, combined with a sub-view selection score on panoramic views, for more accurate action prediction. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on REVERIE, R2R, and R4R, showing the potential of BEV perception in VLN.