# Enhancing Vision-Language Navigation with Multimodal Event Knowledge from Real-World Indoor Tour Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23937 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23937/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00030/) (2022)
- [REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10151/) (2019)
- [Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10092/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10638/) (2020)
- [Where are we in the search for an Artificial Visual Cortex for Embodied Intelligence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18240/) (2023)
- [NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04453/) (2024)
- [Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11742/) (2022)
- [ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03047/) (2023)
- [Episodic Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06453/) (2021)
- [Towards Learning a Generalist Model for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02010/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) agents often struggle with long-horizon reasoning in unseen environments, particularly when facing ambiguous, coarse-grained instructions. While recent advances use knowledge graph to enhance reasoning, the potential of multimodal event knowledge inspired by human episodic memory remains underexplored. In this work, we propose an event-centric knowledge enhancement strategy for automated process knowledge mining and feature fusion to solve coarse-grained instruction and long-horizon reasoning in VLN task. First, we construct YE-KG, the first large-scale multimodal spatiotemporal knowledge graph, with over 86k nodes and 83k edges, derived from real-world indoor videos. By leveraging multimodal large language models (i.e., LLaVa, GPT4), we extract unstructured video streams into structured semantic-action-effect events to serve as explicit episodic memory. Second, we introduce STE-VLN, which integrates the above graph into VLN models via a Coarse-to-Fine Hierarchical Retrieval mechanism. This allows agents to retrieve causal event sequences and dynamically fuse them with egocentric visual observations. Experiments on REVERIE, R2R, and R2R-CE benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency of our event-centric strategy, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches across diverse action spaces. Our data and code are available on the project website https://sites.google.com/view/y-event-kg/.
