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NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigation

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arxiv 2412.04453 v2 pith:FU5ZF6UD submitted 2024-12-05 cs.RO cs.CV

NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigation

classification cs.RO cs.CV
keywords navilaactionslow-levelrobotbenchmarkslanguageleggedlocomotion
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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This paper proposes to solve the problem of Vision-and-Language Navigation with legged robots, which not only provides a flexible way for humans to command but also allows the robot to navigate through more challenging and cluttered scenes. However, it is non-trivial to translate human language instructions all the way to low-level leg joint actions. We propose NaVILA, a 2-level framework that unifies a Vision-Language-Action model (VLA) with locomotion skills. Instead of directly predicting low-level actions from VLA, NaVILA first generates mid-level actions with spatial information in the form of language, (e.g., "moving forward 75cm"), which serves as an input for a visual locomotion RL policy for execution. NaVILA substantially improves previous approaches on existing benchmarks. The same advantages are demonstrated in our newly developed benchmarks with IsaacLab, featuring more realistic scenes, low-level controls, and real-world robot experiments. We show more results at https://navila-bot.github.io/

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Cited by 49 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    The paper introduces a Trajectory Waypoint paradigm with a TSDF-guided diffusion policy and trajectory-enhanced navigator that achieves better performance on VLN-CE benchmarks by ensuring waypoint reachability and pla...

  2. POINav: Benchmarking and Enhancing Final-Meters Arrival in Real-World Vision-Language Navigation

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    POINav-Bench provides the first high-fidelity real-world benchmark for POI-goal VLN using 3DGS reconstructions of 126k m² with 163 POIs, supported by a Brain-Action framework and 70K real signage-entrance dataset.

  3. AwareVLN: Reasoning with Self-awareness for Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    AwareVLN introduces a structural reasoning module and automatic data engine with progress division to equip VLN agents with self-awareness of agent state and task progress, outperforming prior methods on Habitat datasets.

  4. Beyond Isolation: A Unified Benchmark for General-Purpose Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    OmniNavBench is a unified benchmark for general-purpose navigation featuring composite multi-skill instructions, support for humanoid, quadrupedal and wheeled robots, and 1779 human teleoperated trajectories across 17...

  5. Dual-Anchoring: Addressing State Drift in Vision-Language Navigation

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    Dual-Anchoring Framework mitigates progress drift via structured instruction tokens and memory drift via landmark-centric retrospective prediction, yielding 15.2% success rate gain and 24.7% on long trajectories.

  6. VLN-Cache: Enabling Token Caching for VLN Models with Visual/Semantic Dynamics Awareness

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    VLN-Cache delivers up to 1.52x faster inference in VLN models by using view-aligned remapping for geometric consistency and a task-relevance saliency filter to manage semantic changes during navigation.

  7. ACE-Brain-0.5: A Unified Embodied Foundational Model for Physical Agentic AI

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

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  8. Path-level Hindsight Instructions for Semantic Exploration in Vision-Language Navigation

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    Phi-Nav generates path-level hindsight instructions from on-policy exploration trajectories to supply additional semantic supervision for vision-language navigation agents.

  9. SpikeVLA: Vision-Language-Action Models with Spiking Neural Networks

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SpikeVLA replaces transformer components in VLA models with spiking vision encoder, multi-modal LLM, and action policy network to reduce energy consumption while maintaining competitive performance on navigation tasks.

  10. BIT-Nav: Brain-Inspired Trajectory Memory for Embodied Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BIT-Nav augments VLMs with a Bi-GRU trajectory embedding projected as one memory token to supply structured motion history at constant token cost.

  11. Vesta: A Generalist Embodied Reasoning Model

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    Vesta is a unified embodied generalist model that outperforms specialist baselines by over 20% on average and improves real-world robotic task success by over 35%.

  12. VEGA: Learning Navigation VLAs from In-the-Wild Egocentric Video with Geometric Trajectory Supervision

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    VEGA reconstructs local geometry from monocular egocentric video to create supervised trajectories that train a flow-matching VLA policy, yielding lower collision rates on a new benchmark and in real-world tests.

  13. From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

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  14. Goal2Pixel: Grounding Goals to Pixels for Vision-Language Navigation

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  15. Uni-LaViRA: Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation for Unified Embodied Navigation

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  16. GA-VLN: Geometry-Aware BEV Representation for Efficient Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GA-VLN builds a geometry-aware BEV representation from RGB-D inputs plus 3D foundation model features to deliver state-of-the-art vision-language navigation using only navigation data.

  17. SEDualVLN: A Spatially-Enhanced Dual-System for Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SEDualVLN proposes a spatially-enhanced dual-system VLN framework that pairs a fast VLM action generator with a slow MLLM waypoint planner and reports state-of-the-art results on VLN-CE benchmarks.

  18. SpaAct: Spatially-Activated Transition Learning with Curriculum Adaptation for Vision-Language Navigation

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    SpaAct activates spatial awareness in VLMs using action retrospection, future frame prediction, and progressive curriculum learning to reach SOTA on VLN-CE benchmarks.

  19. Dual-Anchoring: Addressing State Drift in Vision-Language Navigation

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  20. CART: Context-Aware Terrain Adaptation using Temporal Sequence Selection for Legged Robots

    cs.RO 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    CART learns a vision–proprioception terrain context and uses Temporal Sequence Selection to cut base oscillation by up to 41% in simulation and 22% on Spot outdoors, with a 5% higher sim success rate.

  21. Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A coupled world-agent framework uses 3D Gaussian reconstruction and first-person RGB-D perception with iterative planning to enable goal-directed, collision-avoiding humanoid behavior in novel reconstructed scenes.

  22. HiRO-Nav: Hybrid ReasOning Enables Efficient Embodied Navigation

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HiRO-Nav adaptively triggers reasoning only on high-entropy actions via a hybrid training pipeline and shows better success-token trade-offs than always-reason or never-reason baselines on the CHORES-S benchmark.

  23. Learning Task-Invariant Properties via Dreamer: Enabling Efficient Policy Transfer for Quadruped Robots

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

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  24. AstraNav-World: World Model for Foresight Control and Consistency

    cs.CV 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AstraNav-World unifies diffusion video generation and vision-language action planning in a single bidirectional model that improves trajectory accuracy, success rates, and zero-shot real-world adaptation in embodied n...

  25. Progress-Think: Semantic Progress Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Semantic progress reasoning predicts instruction-style advancement from visual history to guide policies, yielding state-of-the-art success and efficiency on R2R-CE and RxR-CE.

  26. R2RGEN: Real-to-Real 3D Data Generation for Spatially Generalized Manipulation

    cs.RO 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    R2RGen introduces a simulator-free three-stage pipeline that parses, augments, and post-processes real pointcloud observation-action pairs to improve spatial generalization in robotic manipulation policies.

  27. Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policies

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  28. $\pi_{0.5}$: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization

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  29. FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models

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  30. Green for Go, Red for No: Visual Grounding via Semantic Segmentation for VLA Navigation Policies

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    Real-time SegFormer green/red overlays reduce OmniVLA far-waypoint error 27-44% on Grand Tour language goals mainly by shortening trajectories, with little help for image goals.

  31. MemVLN: Episodic and Procedural Memory for Vision-and-Language Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Pyramidal multi-resolution visual memory plus single-token mid-level actions let a 4B–8B VLM navigate continuous indoor environments at 14 FPS with SOTA R2R/RxR success rates.

  32. FutureNav: Unified World-Action Modeling for Vision-and-Language Navigation

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    FutureNav proposes a 4B-scale VLM that jointly optimizes action prediction, inverse/forward dynamics, and future state generation for VLN and reports SOTA results on multiple benchmarks.

  33. Slow Brain, Fast Planner: Latency-Resilient VLM-Augmented Urban Navigation

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    A training-free fusion layer enables stale VLM selections to improve a real-time planner's trajectory scoring for urban sidewalk navigation, yielding 30% ADE reduction in challenging scenarios.

  34. Act on What You See: Unlocking Safe Social Navigation in Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SALSA aligns social features and adds future-risk signals in VLA models to cut near-collisions by 86.4% and raise social accuracy from 53% to 93% on SCAND and real robots.

  35. G-DRAGON: Geospatial Reasoning and Dynamic Planning for Retrieval-Augmented Outdoor Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    G-DRAGON framework maps language commands to OSM coordinates via lightweight LLM for global planning and uses frontier exploration for local targets, outperforming baselines in simulation and completing real UGV perso...

  36. SEDualVLN: A Spatially-Enhanced Dual-System for Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    SEDualVLN introduces a spatially-enhanced dual-system VLN architecture that achieves state-of-the-art results on VLN-CE benchmarks through coordinated VLM action generation and MLLM waypoint planning.

  37. Terrain Consistent Reference-Guided RL for Humanoid Navigation Autonomy

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Terrain-consistent reference modulation during RL training yields SE(2)-controllable humanoid locomotion policies that improve tracking in simulation and enable over 70 m closed-loop autonomous navigation on rough ter...

  38. Dual-Anchoring: Addressing State Drift in Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Dual-Anchoring adds explicit progress tokens and retrospective landmark verification to VLN agents, cutting state drift and lifting success rate 15.2% overall with 24.7% gains on long trajectories.

  39. Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    HRNav decomposes image-goal navigation into VLM-based short-horizon planning and RL-based execution with a wandering suppression penalty to improve performance in complex unseen settings.

  40. CART: Context-Aware Terrain Adaptation using Temporal Sequence Selection for Legged Robots

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    CART integrates vision and body sensing via temporal sequences to improve legged robot stability and success rates on complex terrain by 5% in simulation and up to 45% in real-world tests.

  41. A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models: An Action Tokenization Perspective

    cs.RO 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The survey frames VLA models as pipelines that generate progressively grounded action tokens and classifies those tokens into eight types to guide future development.

  42. NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models

    cs.CV 2024-12 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    NVILA improves on VILA with a scale-then-compress visual token strategy and full-lifecycle efficiency optimizations, matching or exceeding leading VLMs on image and video benchmarks while reducing training cost 1.9-5....

  43. Exp2VLA: Enabling Vision-Language-Action for Drone Navigation from Expert Demonstrations

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 4.0

    Expert demonstrations distilled into LeRobot-format data let fine-tuned mid-scale VLAs navigate multi-object drone scenes from language, with partial zero-shot color-shape generalization in simulation and SITL.

  44. Vision-Language Models for Deployable Social Robot Navigation: Bridging Semantic Reasoning and Low-Level Control

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Survey organizing VLM-based social robot navigation into reasoning, planning, and bridging components with a proposed roadmap for hybrid deployable systems.

  45. FlowDec: Temporal Conditional Flow Decorruptor for Robust Continuous Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    FlowDec is a novel image restoration framework using hybrid temporal conditioning and action-centroid filtering that claims to outperform prior decorruption methods on navigation accuracy and latency in VLN-CE.

  46. Ask When It Pays: Cost-Aware Open-Ended Interaction for Instance Goal Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Proposes cost-aware question selection for ambiguous object navigation via information-gain analysis on corpora, a cost-penalizing benchmark, and a zero-shot MLLM agent.

  47. PEACE: A Planner-Executor Agent with Constraint Enforcement for UAVs

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    PEACE decouples single-pass LLM planning from PX4 execution via ROS 2 and a constraint layer, with modular 3D perception, and shows feasibility in Gazebo SITL with improved explainability and fewer LLM calls.

  48. Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs: Progress, Challenges, and a Research Roadmap

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A survey of UAV vision-and-language navigation that establishes a methodological taxonomy, reviews resources and challenges, and proposes a forward-looking research roadmap.

  49. Hierarchical Semantic-Augmented Navigation: Optimal Transport and Graph-Driven Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    HSAN integrates hierarchical semantic graphs, optimal transport-based goal selection, and graph-aware RL to claim SOTA results on VLN-CE tasks.