Resolving Positional Ambiguity in Dialogues by Vision-Language Models for Robot Navigation
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Embodied and 3D vision-language models
Abstract (arXiv)
We consider an autonomous navigation robot that can accept human commands through natural language to provide services in an indoor environment. These natural language commands may include time, position, object, and action components. However, we observe that the positional components within such commands usually refer to objects in the environment that may contain different levels of positional ambiguity. For example, the command "Go to the chair!" may be ambiguous when there are multiple chairs of the same type in a room. In order to disambiguate these commands, we employ a large language model and a large vision-language model to conduct multiple turns of conversations with the user. We propose a two-level approach that utilizes a vision-language model to map the meanings in natural language to a unique object ID in images and then performs another mapping from the unique object ID to a 3D depth map, thereby allowing the robot to navigate from its current position to the target position. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work linking foundation models to the positional ambiguity issue.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2024.
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- 2022EnvEdit: Environment Editing for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 83
- 2021Vision-Language Navigation with Random Environmental Mixupcited by 70
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