# DialNav: Multi-turn Dialog Navigation with a Remote Guide

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12894/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02724/) (2018)
- [Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11543/) (2017)
- [REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10151/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12255/) (2019)
- [SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17138/) (2021)
- [Scaling Data Generation in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15644/) (2023)
- [Help, Anna! Visual Navigation with Natural Multimodal Assistance via Retrospective Curiosity-Encouraging Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01871/) (2019)
- [Vision-based Navigation with Language-based Assistance via Imitation Learning with Indirect Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04155/) (2018)
- [Executing Instructions in Situated Collaborative Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03655/) (2019)
- [Less is More: Generating Grounded Navigation Instructions from Landmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12872/) (2021)
- [DialFRED: Dialogue-Enabled Agents for Embodied Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13330/) (2022)
- [Just Ask:An Interactive Learning Framework for Vision and Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00915/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual Cycle-Consistent Learning for Instruction Following and Generation in Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16586/) (2022)
- [Learning from Unlabeled 3D Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11781/) (2022)
- [Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12219/) (2022)
- [TopViewRS: Vision-Language Models as Top-View Spatial Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02537/) (2024)
- [Talk the Walk: Navigating New York City through Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03367/) (2018)
- [Lana: A Language-Capable Navigator for Instruction Following and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08409/) (2023)
- [RMM: A Recursive Mental Model for Dialog Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00728/) (2020)
- [The RobotSlang Benchmark: Dialog-guided Robot Localization and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12639/) (2020)
- [Where Are You? Localization from Embodied Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08277/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Text Style Transfer for Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00229/) (2020)
- [Ask4Help: Learning to Leverage an Expert for Embodied Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09960/) (2022)
- [InstruGen: Automatic Instruction Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation Via Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11394/) (2024)

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

- [Ask When It Pays: Cost-Aware Open-Ended Interaction for Instance Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03175/) (2026)
- [Listen, Look, Drive: Coupling Audio Instructions for User-aware VLA-based Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12142/) (2026)
- [Goal-oriented Navigation Instruction Generation with Tour Video Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08596/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce DialNav, a novel collaborative embodied dialog task, where a navigation agent (Navigator) and a remote guide (Guide) engage in multi-turn dialog to reach a goal location. Unlike prior work, DialNav aims for holistic evaluation and requires the Guide to infer the Navigator's location, making communication essential for task success. To support this task, we collect and release the Remote Assistance in Navigation (RAIN) dataset, human-human dialog paired with navigation trajectories in photorealistic environments. We design a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate both navigation and dialog, and conduct extensive experiments analyzing the impact of different Navigator and Guide models. We highlight key challenges and publicly release the dataset, code, and evaluation framework to foster future research in embodied dialog.