MAGIC: Meta-Ability Guided Interactive Chain-of-Distillation for Effective-and-Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation
On the map: Knowledge distillation → Multimodal distillation
Abstract (arXiv)
Despite the remarkable developments of recent large models in Embodied Artificial Intelligence (E-AI), their integration into robotics is hampered by their excessive parameter sizes and computational demands. Towards the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task, a core task in E-AI, this paper reveals the great potential of using knowledge distillation for obtaining lightweight student models by proposing a Meta-Ability Guided Interactive Chain-of-distillation (MAGIC) method. Specifically, a Meta-Ability Knowledge Distillation (MAKD) framework is proposed for decoupling and refining the necessary meta-abilities of VLN agents. A Meta-Knowledge Randomization Weighting (MKRW) and a Meta-Knowledge Transferable Determination (MKTD) module are incorporated to dynamically adjust aggregation weights at the meta-ability and sample levels, respectively. Move beyond the traditional one-step unidirectional distillation, an Interactive Chain-of-Distillation (ICoD) learning strategy is proposed to allow students to give feedback to teachers, forming a new multi-step teacher-student co-evolution pipeline. Remarkably, on the R2R test unseen public leaderboard, our smallest model, MAGIC-S, with only 5% (11M) of the teacher's size, outperforms all previous methods under the same training data. Additionally, our largest model, MAGIC-L, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 5.84% in SPL and 3.18% in SR. Furthermore, a new dataset was collected and annotated from our living environments, where MAGIC-S demonstrated superior performance and real-time efficiency. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/CrystalSixone/VLN-MAGIC.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation. Builds on 63 of its 85 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2024.
Builds on
63 of 85 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2023DLIP: Distilling Language-Image Pre-training24 Aug
- 2022Enabling Multimodal Generation on CLIP via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation12 Mar
Other references · 61
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38 more
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50 most cited of 61 All 61 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 0; 2026: 4.
6 papers.
- 2024Bootstrapping Language-Guided Navigation Learning with Self-Refining Data Flywheelcited by 20
- 2024MiniVLN: Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation by Progressive Knowledge Distillationcited by 6
- 2026Trajectory-Diversity-Driven Robust Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 5
- 2026All-day Multi-scenes Lifelong Vision-and-Language Navigation with Tucker Adaptationcited by 2
- 2026A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 1
- 2026Query, Align, and Distill: Navigation-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction for Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 0
- 2026Query, Align, and Distill: Navigation-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction for Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation27 Sep 2026
- 2026A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation9 Jul 2026
- 2026Trajectory-Diversity-Driven Robust Vision-and-Language Navigation16 Mar 2026
- 2026All-day Multi-scenes Lifelong Vision-and-Language Navigation with Tucker Adaptation15 Mar 2026
- 2024Bootstrapping Language-Guided Navigation Learning with Self-Refining Data Flywheel11 Dec 2024
- 2024MiniVLN: Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation by Progressive Knowledge Distillation27 Sep 2024
Similar, not cited
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- 2026SymVD: Symmetric Vision Language Action Distillation for Robot Manipulation
- 2025SE-VLN: A Self-Evolving Vision-Language Navigation Framework Based on Multimodal Large Language Models
- 2025VLNVerse: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Navigation with Versatile, Embodied, Realistic Simulation and Evaluation
- 2026Training Generalist Navigation Policies via Action Self-Distillation
- 2025Landmark-Guided Knowledge for Vision-and-Language Navigation
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