# Embodied Navigation with Auxiliary Task of Action Description Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL for robot locomotion and manipulation, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 66 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for robot locomotion and manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-robot-locomotion-and-manipulation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02724/) (2018)
- [REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10151/) (2019)
- [A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13922/) (2020)
- [NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16986/) (2023)
- [History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13309/) (2021)
- [Learning to Navigate Unseen Environments: Back Translation with Environmental Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04195/) (2019)
- [Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11742/) (2022)
- [Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07883/) (2019)
- [ZSON: Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation using Multimodal Goal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12403/) (2022)

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

- [From Instruction to Event: Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21667/) (2026)
- [GroundControl: Anticipating Navigation Failures in Vision-Language Agents via Trajectory-Consistent Uncertainty Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20479/) (2026)
- [Spatial-Aware Conditioned Fusion for Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of multimodal robot navigation in indoor environments has garnered significant attention in recent years. However, as tasks and methods become more advanced, the action decision systems tend to become more complex and operate as black-boxes. For a reliable system, the ability to explain or describe its decisions is crucial; however, there tends to be a trade-off in that explainable systems can not outperform non-explainable systems in terms of performance. In this paper, we propose incorporating the task of describing actions in language into the reinforcement learning of navigation as an auxiliary task. Existing studies have found it difficult to incorporate describing actions into reinforcement learning due to the absence of ground-truth data. We address this issue by leveraging knowledge distillation from pre-trained description generation models, such as vision-language models. We comprehensively evaluate our approach across various navigation tasks, demonstrating that it can describe actions while attaining high navigation performance. Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in the particularly challenging multimodal navigation task of semantic audio-visual navigation.