VLN-NF: Feasibility-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation with False-Premise Instructions
Hung-Ting Su, Ting-Jun Wang, Jia-Fong Yeh, Min Sun, Winston H. Hsu
Abstract
Conventional Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks assume instructions are feasible and the referenced target exists, leaving agents ill-equipped to handle false-premise goals. We introduce VLN-NF, a benchmark with false-premise instructions where the target is absent from the specified area and agents must navigate, gather evidence through in-room exploration, and explicitly output . VLN-NF is constructed via a scalable pipeline that rewrites VLN instructions using an LLM and verifies target absence with a VLM, producing plausible yet factually incorrect goals. We further propose REV-SPL to jointly evaluate room reaching, exploration coverage, and decision correctness. To address this challenge, we present ROAM, a two-stage hybrid that combines supervised room-level navigation with LLM/VLM-driven in-room exploration guided by a free-space clearance prior. ROAM achieves the best REV-SPL among compared methods, while baselines often under-explore and terminate prematurely under unreliable instructions. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.1152
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 25134–25150
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1152/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Hung-Ting Su, Ting-Jun Wang, Jia-Fong Yeh, Min Sun, and Winston H. Hsu. 2026. VLN-NF: Feasibility-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation with False-Premise Instructions. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 25134–25150, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- VLN-NF: Feasibility-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation with False-Premise Instructions (Su et al., ACL 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1152.pdf