Anticipate Before Acting: Future-State-Conditioned Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv:2607.18042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end vision-language navigation (VLN) with causal vision-language models can map instructions and egocentric observations directly to actions, but standard behavior cloning supervises only the next action and does not explicitly train the policy state to be predictive of future visual outcomes. We first ask a diagnostic question: if the policy is given an expert-trajectory future image as privileged input at training and testing time, is that additional visual evidence useful for choosing the current action? (These expert-trajectory future images are unavailable at test time in real deployment, so we use this setting only as a privileged-input diagnostic.) The answer is yes; this sanity check shows that future observations can provide rich, actionable cues. We then ask a deployable question: without accessing future images at inference, can we still benefit from future information by using a compressed future visual latent only as training supervision? We propose Future-State-Conditioned VLN (FSC-VLN), which adds a future-query token and aligns its hidden state to a frozen visual embedding $\Delta$ steps ahead via a training-only target branch that is removed after training. On R2R val-unseen, FSC-VLN improves SR/OSR/SPL over a StreamVLN-style baseline under two training-data regimes, with larger gains on long-horizon episodes; ablations further support the dual-query design (separating future and action queries).

Abstract:End-to-end vision-language navigation (VLN) with causal vision-language models can map instructions and egocentric observations directly to actions, but standard behavior cloning supervises only the next action and does not explicitly train the policy state to be predictive of future visual outcomes. We first ask a diagnostic question: if the policy is given an expert-trajectory future image as privileged input at training and testing time, is that additional visual evidence useful for choosing the current action? (These expert-trajectory future images are unavailable at test time in real deployment, so we use this setting only as a privileged-input diagnostic.) The answer is yes; this sanity check shows that future observations can provide rich, actionable cues. We then ask a deployable question: without accessing future images at inference, can we still benefit from future information by using a compressed future visual latent only as training supervision? We propose Future-State-Conditioned VLN (FSC-VLN), which adds a future-query token and aligns its hidden state to a frozen visual embedding $\Delta$ steps ahead via a training-only target branch that is removed after training. On R2R val-unseen, FSC-VLN improves SR/OSR/SPL over a StreamVLN-style baseline under two training-data regimes, with larger gains on long-horizon episodes; ablations further support the dual-query design (separating future and action queries).

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2607.18042 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2607.18042v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.18042 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

analiza aiqbench

Anticipate Before Acting: Future-State-Conditioned Vision-Language Navigation

Subiecte conexe