CorNav: Autonomous Agent with Self-Corrected Planning for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation

Xiwen Liang, Liang Ma, Shanshan Guo, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Shikui Ma, Xiaodan Liang


Abstract
Understanding and following natural language instructions while navigating through complex, real-world environments poses a significant challenge for general-purpose robots. These environments often include obstacles and pedestrians, making it essential for autonomous agents to possess the capability of self-corrected planning to adjust their actions based on feedback from the surroundings. However, the majority of existing vision-and-language navigation (VLN) methods primarily operate in less realistic simulator settings and do not incorporate environmental feedback into their decision-making processes. To address this gap, we introduce a novel zero-shot framework called CorNav, utilizing a large language model for decision-making and comprising two key components: 1) incorporating environmental feedback for refining future plans and adjusting its actions, and 2) multiple domain experts for parsing instructions, scene understanding, and refining predicted actions. In addition to the framework, we develop a 3D simulator that renders realistic scenarios using Unreal Engine 5. To evaluate the effectiveness and generalization of navigation agents in a zero-shot multi-task setting, we create a benchmark called NavBench. Our empirical study involves deploying 7 baselines across four tasks, i.e., goal-conditioned navigation given a specific object category, goal-conditioned navigation given simple instructions, finding abstract objects based on high-level instructions, and step-by-step instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CorNav consistently outperforms all baselines by a significant margin across all tasks. On average, CorNav achieves a success rate of 28.1%, surpassing the best baseline’s performance of 20.5%.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.745
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12538–12559
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.745
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.745
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiwen Liang, Liang Ma, Shanshan Guo, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Shikui Ma, and Xiaodan Liang. 2024. CorNav: Autonomous Agent with Self-Corrected Planning for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 12538–12559, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CorNav: Autonomous Agent with Self-Corrected Planning for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation (Liang et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.findings-acl.745.pdf