mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

STRIDER: Navigation via Instruction-Aligned Structural Decision Space Optimization

arXiv 2511.00033 ↗First posted 27 Oct 2025cs.RO cs.AIcited by 6

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Abstract (arXiv)

The Zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) task requires agents to navigate previously unseen 3D environments using natural language instructions, without any scene-specific training. A critical challenge in this setting lies in ensuring agents' actions align with both spatial structure and task intent over long-horizon execution. Existing methods often fail to achieve robust navigation due to a lack of structured decision-making and insufficient integration of feedback from previous actions. To address these challenges, we propose STRIDER (Instruction-Aligned Structural Decision Space Optimization), a novel framework that systematically optimizes the agent's decision space by integrating spatial layout priors and dynamic task feedback. Our approach introduces two key innovations: 1) a Structured Waypoint Generator that constrains the action space through spatial structure, and 2) a Task-Alignment Regulator that adjusts behavior based on task progress, ensuring semantic alignment throughout navigation. Extensive experiments on the R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks demonstrate that STRIDER significantly outperforms strong SOTA across key metrics; in particular, it improves Success Rate (SR) from 29% to 35%, a relative gain of 20.7%. Such results highlight the importance of spatially constrained decision-making and feedback-guided execution in improving navigation fidelity for zero-shot VLN-CE.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 51 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2025.

Builds on

51 of 63 references.

References · 51

  1. 2017Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environmentscited by 1,376
  2. 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,027
  3. 2022LLM-Planner: Few-Shot Grounded Planning for Embodied Agents with Large Language Modelscited by 462
  4. 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 441
  5. 2020Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Groundingcited by 414
  6. 2018Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 340
  7. 2018Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 305
  8. 2020A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigationcited by 302
  9. 2023NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Modelscited by 280
  10. 2017Soft-DTW: a Differentiable Loss Function for Time-Seriescited by 271
  11. 2021History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 271
  12. 2019Vision-and-Dialog Navigationcited by 250
38 more
  1. 2019Learning to Navigate Unseen Environments: Back Translation with Environmental Dropoutcited by 244
  2. 2024NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 233
  3. 2020Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-trainingcited by 231
  4. 2022Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 193
  5. 2019Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Taskscited by 179
  6. 2020Improving Vision-and-Language Navigation with Image-Text Pairs from the Webcited by 177
  7. 2019Self-Monitoring Navigation Agent via Auxiliary Progress Estimationcited by 176
  8. 2023ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 169
  9. 2016Value Iteration Networkscited by 160
  10. 2024InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environmentcited by 157
  11. 2023Towards Learning a Generalist Model for Embodied Navigationcited by 138
  12. 2022Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 132
  13. 2021Airbert: In-domain Pretraining for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 130
  14. 2021Waypoint Models for Instruction-guided Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 129
  15. 2023GridMM: Grid Memory Map for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 124
  16. 2022BEVBert: Multimodal Map Pre-training for Language-guided Navigationcited by 122
  17. 2023Discuss Before Moving: Visual Language Navigation via Multi-expert Discussionscited by 110
  18. 2019The Regretful Agent: Heuristic-Aided Navigation through Progress Estimationcited by 105
  19. 2019General Evaluation for Instruction Conditioned Navigation using Dynamic Time Warpingcited by 105
  20. 2021Language-Aligned Waypoint (LAW) Supervision for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 94
  21. 2022Weakly-Supervised Multi-Granularity Map Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 86
  22. 2019Tactical Rewind: Self-Correction via Backtracking in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 81
  23. 2020Sub-Instruction Aware Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 66
  24. 2024Lookahead Exploration with Neural Radiance Representation for Continuous Vision-Language Navigationcited by 65
  25. 2023A2Nav: Action-Aware Zero-Shot Robot Navigation by Exploiting Vision-and-Language Ability of Foundation Modelscited by 62
  26. 2024Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMscited by 62
  27. 2025MapNav: A Novel Memory Representation via Annotated Semantic Maps for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 60
  28. 2024Constraint-Aware Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 50
  29. 2023KERM: Knowledge Enhanced Reasoning for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 39
  30. 2025SmartWay: Enhanced Waypoint Prediction and Backtracking for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 29
  31. 2023GP-NeRF: Generalized Perception NeRF for Context-Aware 3D Scene Understandingcited by 20
  32. 2024GGRt: Towards Pose-free Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting in Real-timecited by 20
  33. 2024LangSurf: Language-Embedded Surface Gaussians for 3D Scene Understandingcited by 17
  34. 2024CoSurfGS:Collaborative 3D Surface Gaussian Splatting with Distributed Learning for Large Scene Reconstructioncited by 11
  35. 2023CorNav: Autonomous Agent with Self-Corrected Planning for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 10
  36. 2024DGTR: Distributed Gaussian Turbo-Reconstruction for Sparse-View Vast Scenescited by 5
  37. 2024Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation with Collision Mitigation in Continuous Environmentcited by 4
  38. 2022Fast 3D Sparse Topological Skeleton Graph Generation for Mobile Robot Global Planningcited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

  1. 2026SpatialNav: Leveraging Spatial Scene Graphs for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 9
  2. 2026Holi-Spatial: Evolving Video Streams into Holistic 3D Spatial Intelligencecited by 6
  3. 2026One Agent to Guide Them All: Empowering MLLMs for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Explicit World Representationcited by 5
  4. 2026SpatialAnt: Autonomous Zero-Shot Robot Navigation via Active Scene Reconstruction and Visual Anticipationcited by 2
  5. 2026One MLLM, One Call: Efficient Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation via Spatial-Aware Waypointscited by 0
  6. 2026Affordance-Conditioned Decision Making: Bridging the Semantic-Spatial Gap in Zero-Shot Cross-Floor Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 0