# Discuss Before Moving: Visual Language Navigation via Multi-expert Discussions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11382 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11382/

## Key facts

- Cited by 110 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for navigation, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 39 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2023.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for navigation](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-navigation/)

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

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05782/) (2023)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [PAL: Program-aided Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10435/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02724/) (2018)
- [Recognize Anything: A Strong Image Tagging Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03514/) (2023)
- [A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13922/) (2020)
- [NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16986/) (2023)
- [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)
- [TEACh: Task-driven Embodied Agents that Chat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00534/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 110)

- [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)
- [Understanding World or Predicting Future? A Comprehensive Survey of World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14499/) (2024)
- [Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06224/) (2024)
- [StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05240/) (2025)
- [Large Multimodal Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15116/) (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)
- [NavCoT: Boosting LLM-Based Vision-and-Language Navigation via Learning Disentangled Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07376/) (2024)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07035/) (2024)
- [AppAgent v2: Advanced Agent for Flexible Mobile Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11824/) (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)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [Constraint-Aware Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10137/) (2024)
- [COHERENT: Collaboration of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot System with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15146/) (2024)
- [Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21696/) (2025)
- [CityNav: A Large-Scale Dataset for Real-World Aerial Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14240/) (2024)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer via 3D Feature Fields for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09798/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Destination: A Novel Benchmark for Exploration-Aware Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11117/) (2025)
- [SmartWay: Enhanced Waypoint Prediction and Backtracking for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10069/) (2025)
- [Safety Aware Task Planning via Large Language Models in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15707/) (2025)
- [RoomTour3D: Geometry-Aware Video-Instruction Tuning for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08591/) (2024)
- [ThinkBot: Embodied Instruction Following with Thought Chain Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07062/) (2023)
- [VLNVerse: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Navigation with Versatile, Embodied, Realistic Simulation and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19021/) (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)
- [DreamNav: A Trajectory-Based Imaginative Framework for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11197/) (2025)
- [SAME: Learning Generic Language-Guided Visual Navigation with State-Adaptive Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05552/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual language navigation (VLN) is an embodied task demanding a wide range of skills encompassing understanding, perception, and planning. For such a multifaceted challenge, previous VLN methods totally rely on one model's own thinking to make predictions within one round. However, existing models, even the most advanced large language model GPT4, still struggle with dealing with multiple tasks by single-round self-thinking. In this work, drawing inspiration from the expert consultation meeting, we introduce a novel zero-shot VLN framework. Within this framework, large models possessing distinct abilities are served as domain experts. Our proposed navigation agent, namely DiscussNav, can actively discuss with these experts to collect essential information before moving at every step. These discussions cover critical navigation subtasks like instruction understanding, environment perception, and completion estimation. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that discussions with domain experts can effectively facilitate navigation by perceiving instruction-relevant information, correcting inadvertent errors, and sifting through in-consistent movement decisions. The performances on the representative VLN task R2R show that our method surpasses the leading zero-shot VLN model by a large margin on all metrics. Additionally, real-robot experiments display the obvious advantages of our method over single-round self-thinking.