@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2026-vln,
    title = "{VLN}-{MME}: Diagnosing {MLLM}s as Language-guided Visual Navigation Agents",
    author = "Zhao, Xunyi  and
      Zhou, Gengze  and
      Wu, Qi",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1300/",
    pages = "28207--28231",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, their performance as embodied agents, which requires multi-round interaction with spatial reasoning and sequential action prediction, needs further exploration. Our work investigates this potential in the context of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) by introducing a unified and extensible simulation-free evaluation framework to probe MLLMs as zero-shot agents, named VLN-MME. Simplifying the evaluation with a highly modular and accessible design streamlines experiments, enabling structured comparisons and component-level ablations across diverse MLLM architectures, agent designs, and navigation tasks. Crucially, enabled by VLN-MME, we observe that enhancing prevalent agents with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and self-reflection leads to an unexpected performance decrease. This suggests MLLMs exhibit poor context awareness in embodied navigation tasks; although they can follow instructions and structure their output, their 3D spatial reasoning fidelity is low. Furthermore, we demonstrate that agent performance could be largely improved with simple failure cases in context learning. VLN-MME lays the groundwork for systematic evaluation of general-purpose MLLMs in embodied navigation settings and reveals limitations in their sequential decision-making capabilities. We believe these findings offer crucial guidance for MLLM post-training as embodied agents."
}