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:
Bibkey:
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)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1152.pdf
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