# Grounded Entity-Landmark Adaptive Pre-training for Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12587/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07035/) (2024)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation via Causal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10241/) (2024)
- [Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13209/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Embodied Gap in Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Holistic Study of Physical and Visual Disparities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13019/) (2025)
- [NavBench: Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01031/) (2025)
- [Navigation Instruction Generation with BEV Perception and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15087/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Navigation with Energy-Based Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14250/) (2024)
- [FlexVLN: Flexible Adaptation for Diverse Vision-and-Language Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13966/) (2025)
- [COSMO: Combination of Selective Memorization for Low-cost Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24065/) (2025)
- [Why Only Text: Empowering Vision-and-Language Navigation with Multi-modal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02208/) (2024)
- [MAGIC: Meta-Ability Guided Interactive Chain-of-Distillation for Effective-and-Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17960/) (2024)
- [NavQ: Learning a Q-Model for Foresighted Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16457/) (2025)
- [VISTAv2: World Imagination for Indoor Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00041/) (2025)
- [Generating Vision-Language Navigation Instructions Incorporated Fine-Grained Alignment Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08566/) (2025)
- [NavComposer: Composing Language Instructions for Navigation Trajectories through Action-Scene-Object Modularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10894/) (2025)
- [Trajectory-Diversity-Driven Robust Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15370/) (2026)
- [World-Consistent Data Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06413/) (2024)
- [ASMA: An Adaptive Safety Margin Algorithm for Vision-Language Drone Navigation via Scene-Aware Control Barrier Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10283/) (2024)
- [TapWeight: Reweighting Pretraining Objectives for Task-Adaptive Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10006/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09792/) (2026)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Generative Pretrained Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16994/) (2024)
- [Landmark-Guided Knowledge for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25655/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Vision-Language Navigation with Multimodal Event Knowledge from Real-World Indoor Tour Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23937/) (2026)
- [120 Minutes and a Laptop: Minimalist Image-goal Navigation via Unsupervised Exploration and Offline RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26441/) (2026)
- [FINE: Future-Informed Navigation Encoding for Data-Efficient Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32855/) (2026)
- [Robust Vision-Language Navigation with Awareness of Instruction-Execution Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13104/) (2026)
- [GuidedNav: Shaping Vision-Language Navigation Representations through Pre-action Attention and Spatial Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13122/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-modal alignment is one key challenge for Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). Most existing studies concentrate on mapping the global instruction or single sub-instruction to the corresponding trajectory. However, another critical problem of achieving fine-grained alignment at the entity level is seldom considered. To address this problem, we propose a novel Grounded Entity-Landmark Adaptive (GELA) pre-training paradigm for VLN tasks. To achieve the adaptive pre-training paradigm, we first introduce grounded entity-landmark human annotations into the Room-to-Room (R2R) dataset, named GEL-R2R. Additionally, we adopt three grounded entity-landmark adaptive pre-training objectives: 1) entity phrase prediction, 2) landmark bounding box prediction, and 3) entity-landmark semantic alignment, which explicitly supervise the learning of fine-grained cross-modal alignment between entity phrases and environment landmarks. Finally, we validate our model on two downstream benchmarks: VLN with descriptive instructions (R2R) and dialogue instructions (CVDN). The comprehensive experiments show that our GELA model achieves state-of-the-art results on both tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalizability.