# Flex: End-to-End Text-Instructed Visual Navigation from Foundation Model Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13002 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13002/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05065/) (2017)
- [Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/) (2016)
- [Deep ViT Features as Dense Visual Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05814/) (2021)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13922/) (2020)
- [VQGAN-CLIP: Open Domain Image Generation and Editing with Natural Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08583/) (2022)
- [NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16986/) (2023)
- [Learning to Drive in a Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00412/) (2018)
- [ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14846/) (2023)
- [Unified Contrastive Learning in Image-Text-Label Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03610/) (2022)
- [PLA: Language-Driven Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16312/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Model-Free Reinforcement Learning for Urban Driving using Implicit Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10868/) (2019)
- [Language-Guided Traffic Simulation via Scene-Level Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06344/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [See, Point, Fly: A Learning-Free VLM Framework for Universal Unmanned Aerial Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22653/) (2025)
- [Compress to Impress: Efficient LLM Adaptation Using a Single Gradient Step on 100 Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20800/) (2025)
- [Kernel Reboot: Breaking the Boundaries of Neural Tangent Kernels for Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03117/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end learning directly maps sensory inputs to actions, creating highly integrated and efficient policies for complex robotics tasks. However, such models often struggle to generalize beyond their training scenarios, limiting adaptability to new environments, tasks, and concepts. In this work, we investigate the minimal data requirements and architectural adaptations necessary to achieve robust closed-loop performance with vision-based control policies under unseen text instructions and visual distribution shifts. Our findings are synthesized in Flex (Fly lexically), a framework that uses pre-trained Vision Language Models (VLMs) as frozen patch-wise feature extractors, generating spatially aware embeddings that integrate semantic and visual information. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on a quadrotor fly-to-target task, where agents trained via behavior cloning on a small simulated dataset successfully generalize to real-world scenes with diverse novel goals and command formulations.