# TARIC: Memory-Augmented Traversability-Aware Outdoor VLN under Interrupted Semantic Cues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31121 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31121/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07896/) (2023)
- [ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14846/) (2023)
- [Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06224/) (2024)
- [Towards Learning a Generalist Model for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02010/) (2023)
- [StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05240/) (2025)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07035/) (2024)
- [CoNVOI: Context-aware Navigation using Vision Language Models in Outdoor and Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15637/) (2024)
- [CityWalker: Learning Embodied Urban Navigation from Web-Scale Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17820/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Navigation: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11544/) (2021)
- [RayFronts: Open-Set Semantic Ray Frontiers for Online Scene Understanding and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06994/) (2025)
- [GeNIE: A Generalizable Navigation System for In-the-Wild Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17960/) (2025)
- [OpenNav: Open-World Navigation with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18033/) (2025)
- [ZeST: A VLM-based Zero-Shot Traversability Navigation for Unknown Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19131/) (2025)
- [YOCO: You Only Calibrate Once for Accurate Extrinsic Parameter in LiDAR-Camera Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18043/) (2024)
- [EZREAL: Enhancing Zero-Shot Outdoor Robot Navigation toward Distant Targets under Varying Visibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13720/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Outdoor vision-language navigation (VLN) in long-range, open-world environments is frequently disrupted by semantic-cue interruptions, where informative goal cues become sparse, occluded, or leave the field of view. Once such cues disappear, agents enter a cue-free phase and often degrade into backtracking, oscillatory headings, or aimless exploration. While memory-based methods attempt to bridge these gaps, they often fail under traversability-driven detours: the remembered cue direction may be infeasible, forcing detours that prolong cue-free phases and gradually render robot-centric cues stale and implicit histories blurred. This makes traversability a stability condition for maintaining goal-directed guidance, rather than merely a local safety concern. We propose a unified outdoor VLN framework that survives semantic-cue interruptions by maintaining traversability-consistent executable guidance throughout prolonged cue-free phases. Specifically, our method extracts semantic bearings from visibility-gated goal or exploration cues and grounds them into executable headings using a real-time near-field traversability profile, providing goal-consistent feasible guidance beyond reject-only safety filtering. To prevent guidance degradation during detours, we lift intermittent 2D evidence into a world-aligned 3D cue memory with an uncertainty-aware readout mechanism, ensuring guidance remains continuously reachable and stable as the robot moves. We evaluate the framework on quadrupedal and wheeled platforms over 600--1000 m routes. Our method improves simulation success rate by over 10 percentage points over the strongest baseline and achieves a real-world success rate of 40%, compared to 17.5% for the strongest baseline, with substantially higher robustness during prolonged cue-free intervals.