Guided by the Way: The Role of On-the-route Objects and Scene Text in Enhancing Outdoor Navigation

Abstract

In outdoor environments, Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to rely on multi-modal cues from real-world urban environments and natural language instructions. While existing outdoor VLN models predict actions using a combination of panorama and instruction features, this approach ignores objects in the environment and learns data bias to fail navigation. According to our preliminary findings, most instances of navigation failure in previous models were due to turning or stopping at the wrong place. In contrast, humans intuitively frequently use identifiable objects or store names as reference landmarks, ensuring accurate turns and stops, especially in unfamiliar places. To address this insight gap, we propose an Object-Attention VLN (OAVLN) model that helps the agent focus on relevant objects during training and understand the environment better. Our model outperforms previous methods in all evaluation metrics under both seen and unseen scenarios on two existing benchmark datasets, Touchdown and map2seq.