# March in Chat: Interactive Prompting for Remote Embodied Referring Expression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10141 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10141/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11302/) (2022)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [LLM-Planner: Few-Shot Grounded Planning for Embodied Agents with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04088/) (2022)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12354/) (2018)
- [Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11742/) (2022)
- [Self-Monitoring Navigation Agent via Auxiliary Progress Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03035/) (2019)
- [Synchromesh: Reliable code generation from pre-trained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11227/) (2022)
- [Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12255/) (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)
- [Help, Anna! Visual Navigation with Natural Multimodal Assistance via Retrospective Curiosity-Encouraging Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01871/) (2019)
- [HOP: History-and-Order Aware Pre-training for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11591/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15852/) (2024)
- [Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06886/) (2024)
- [NavGPT-2: Unleashing Navigational Reasoning Capability for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12366/) (2024)
- [MapGPT: Map-Guided Prompting with Adaptive Path Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07314/) (2024)
- [Affordances-Oriented Planning using Foundation Models for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05890/) (2024)
- [VLN-R1: Vision-Language Navigation via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17221/) (2025)
- [Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18794/) (2024)
- [Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21696/) (2025)
- [SmartWay: Enhanced Waypoint Prediction and Backtracking for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10069/) (2025)
- [Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13209/) (2023)
- [MC-GPT: Empowering Vision-and-Language Navigation with Memory Map and Reasoning Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10620/) (2024)
- [Controllable Navigation Instruction Generation with Chain of Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07433/) (2024)
- [NavRAG: Generating User Demand Instructions for Embodied Navigation through Retrieval-Augmented LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11142/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Advances in Embodied Navigation Using Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00530/) (2023)
- [Can LLMs Generate Human-Like Wayfinding Instructions? Towards Platform-Agnostic Embodied Instruction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11487/) (2024)
- [NavQ: Learning a Q-Model for Foresighted Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16457/) (2025)
- [VLN-MME: Diagnosing MLLMs as Language-guided Visual Navigation agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24851/) (2025)
- [Self-Explainable Affordance Learning with Embodied Caption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05603/) (2024)
- [EvolveNav: Empowering LLM-Based Vision-Language Navigation via Self-Improving Embodied Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01551/) (2025)
- [Boosting Zero-Shot VLN via Abstract Obstacle Map-Based Waypoint Prediction with TopoGraph-and-VisitInfo-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20499/) (2025)
- [Think Hierarchically, Act Dynamically: Hierarchical Multi-modal Fusion and Reasoning for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16516/) (2025)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation with Analogical Textual Descriptions in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25139/) (2025)
- [UNeMo: Collaborative Visual-Language Reasoning and Navigation via a Multimodal World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18845/) (2025)
- [Ask When It Pays: Cost-Aware Open-Ended Interaction for Instance Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03175/) (2026)
- [To Ask or Not to Ask? Detecting Absence of Information in Vision and Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05831/) (2024)
- [Temporal-Spatial Object Relations Modeling for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15691/) (2024)
- [AI-Gadget Kit: Integrating Swarm User Interfaces with LLM-driven Agents for Rich Tabletop Game Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17086/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks have been proposed in recent years, from room-based to object-based and indoor to outdoor. The REVERIE (Remote Embodied Referring Expression) is interesting since it only provides high-level instructions to the agent, which are closer to human commands in practice. Nevertheless, this poses more challenges than other VLN tasks since it requires agents to infer a navigation plan only based on a short instruction. Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential in robot action planning by providing proper prompts. Still, this strategy has not been explored under the REVERIE settings. There are several new challenges. For example, the LLM should be environment-aware so that the navigation plan can be adjusted based on the current visual observation. Moreover, the LLM planned actions should be adaptable to the much larger and more complex REVERIE environment. This paper proposes a March-in-Chat (MiC) model that can talk to the LLM on the fly and plan dynamically based on a newly proposed Room-and-Object Aware Scene Perceiver (ROASP). Our MiC model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by large margins by SPL and RGSPL metrics on the REVERIE benchmark.