# From Region Arrival to Instance-Level Grounding in Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03792 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03792/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2026.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10151/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Dialog Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04957/) (2019)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03047/) (2023)
- [Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset (HSSD-200): An Analysis of 3D Scene Scale and Realism Tradeoffs for ObjectGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11290/) (2023)
- [InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04882/) (2024)
- [Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06224/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02764/) (2022)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Semantics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05633/) (2022)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07035/) (2024)
- [HOP: History-and-Order Aware Pre-training for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11591/) (2022)
- [Constraint-Aware Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10137/) (2024)
- [SmartWay: Enhanced Waypoint Prediction and Backtracking for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10069/) (2025)
- [Last-Mile Embodied Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11746/) (2022)
- [Dynam3D: Dynamic Layered 3D Tokens Empower VLM for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11383/) (2025)
- [Curriculum Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07228/) (2021)
- [Object Goal Navigation with Recursive Implicit Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05602/) (2023)
- [COSMO: Combination of Selective Memorization for Low-cost Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24065/) (2025)
- [MSGNav: Unleashing the Power of Multi-modal 3D Scene Graph for Zero-Shot Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10376/) (2025)
- [Progress-Think: Semantic Progress Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17097/) (2025)
- [CapNav: Benchmarking Vision Language Models on Capability-conditioned Indoor Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18424/) (2026)
- [D3D-VLP: Dynamic 3D Vision-Language-Planning Model for Embodied Grounding and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12622/) (2025)
- [Does Peer Observation Help? Vision-Sharing Collaboration for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20804/) (2026)
- [AnyImageNav: Any-View Geometry for Precise Last-Meter Image-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05351/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents may satisfy conventional success criteria while still failing to establish reliable object-level grounding, because current evaluation protocols mainly reward stopping within a 3-meter radius and largely ignore the agent's final orientation and target visibility. We formalize this limitation as the Last-3-Meter Grounding Gap and introduce three instance-centric metrics to quantify proximity precision, target visibility, and final-view grounding. To mitigate this gap, we propose REALM (Region-to-Entity Alignment for Last-3-Meter Navigation), a plug-and-play, architecture-agnostic refinement module that decouples fine-grained target approaching from long-horizon navigation. REALM uses a visibility-aware stopping strategy to reduce premature termination and improve final viewpoint alignment. We further construct REVERIE-AIM, which provides object-instance-level goals and 180K short-horizon training samples for final-stage target approaching. Extensive evaluations across four diverse VLN backbones show that REALM consistently improves proximity precision and visual grounding success, demonstrating its broad applicability.