# MLFM: Multi-Layered Feature Maps for Richer Language Understanding in Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07299 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07299/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (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 38 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03275/) (2023)
- [CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10421/) (2022)
- [Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset (HSSD-200): An Analysis of 3D Scene Scale and Realism Tradeoffs for ObjectGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11290/) (2023)
- [Self-Adaptive In-Context Learning: An Information Compression Perspective for In-Context Example Selection and Ordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10375/) (2022)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11565/) (2023)
- [SED: A Simple Encoder-Decoder for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15537/) (2023)
- [MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03912/) (2020)
- [GOAT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06609/) (2024)
- [GOAT: GO to Any Thing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06430/) (2023)
- [HM3D-OVON: A Dataset and Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14296/) (2024)
- [MapNav: A Novel Memory Representation via Annotated Semantic Maps for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13451/) (2025)
- [Instance-Specific Image Goal Navigation: Training Embodied Agents to Find Object Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15876/) (2022)
- [Retrospectives on the Embodied AI Workshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06849/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DIV-Nav: Open-Vocabulary Spatial Relationships for Multi-Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16518/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in large vision-language models has driven improvements in language-based semantic navigation, where an embodied agent must reach a target object described in natural language. Yet we still lack a clear, language-focused evaluation framework to test how well agents ground the words in their instructions. We address this gap by proposing LangNav, an open-vocabulary multi-object navigation dataset with natural language goal descriptions (e.g. 'go to the red short candle on the table') and corresponding fine-grained linguistic annotations (e.g., attributes: color=red, size=short; relations: support=on). These labels enable systematic evaluation of language understanding. To evaluate on this setting, we extend multi-object navigation task setting to Language-guided Multi-Object Navigation (LaMoN), where the agent must find a sequence of goals specified using language. Furthermore, we propose Multi-Layered Feature Map (MLFM), a novel method that builds a queryable, multi-layered semantic map from pretrained vision-language features and proves effective for reasoning over fine-grained attributes and spatial relations in goal descriptions. Experiments on LangNav show that MLFM outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot mapping-based navigation baselines.