# NavJev: Efficient Vision-Language Navigation via Action-Centric Visual Compression and Discriminative Action-Semantic Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34969 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34969/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) methods increasingly rely on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to reason over visual observations, navigation instructions, and candidate actions. Although effective, repeatedly invoking autoregressive multimodal reasoning at every navigation step introduces substantial inference latency, limiting the responsiveness of embodied agents. We propose NavJev, an efficient VLN framework that reformulates online navigation from repeated multimodal generation into compact visual compression followed by lightweight typed action selection. Specifically, Action-Centric Visual Compression (ACVC) integrates waypoint geometry, BLIP captions, and RAM semantic tags into compact representations of candidate actions, while Discriminative Action-Semantic Memory (DASM) filters shared semantics and maintains discriminative action-specific evidence across navigation steps. Based on these representations, Jev directly performs structured probabilistic decisions over the available action set. Experiments on R2R-CE show that NavJev achieves 27.0% SR and 22.4% SPL with only 0.65 s per navigation step, while substantially reducing inference latency and cost compared with MLLM-based VLN methods. The project page is available at https://kai-sheng-caesar.github.io/NavJev/.