Bootstrapping Language-Guided Navigation Learning with Self-Refining Data Flywheel

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission1544 Authors

Keywords: vision-and-language navigation, data flywheel, dataset curation

Abstract: Creating high-quality data for training robust language-instructed agents is a long-lasting challenge in embodied AI. In this paper, we introduce a Self-Refining Data Flywheel (SRDF) that generates high-quality and large-scale navigational instruction-trajectory pairs by iteratively refining the data pool through the collaboration between two models, the instruction generator and the navigator, without any human-in-the-loop annotation. Specifically, SRDF starts with using a base generator to create an initial data pool for training a base navigator, followed by applying the trained strong navigator to filter the data pool. This leads to higher-fidelity data to train a better generator, which can, in turn, produce higher-quality data for training the next-round navigator. Such a flywheel establishes a data self-refining process, yielding a continuously improved and highly effective dataset for large-scale language-guided navigation learning. Our experiments demonstrate that after several flywheel rounds, the navigator elevates the performance boundary from 70% to 78% SPL on the classic R2R test set, surpassing human performance (76%) for the first time. Meanwhile, this process results in a superior instruction generator, as reflected by the improved SPICE from 23.5 to 25.7, better than all published approaches tailored for VLN instruction generation. Finally, we demonstrate the scalability of our method through increasing environment and instruction diversity, and the generalization ability of our pre-trained navigator across various downstream navigation tasks, surpassing state-of-the-art performance by a large margin in all cases. Code is uploaded as supplementary materials and all our data/code/models will also be publicly released.

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

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Submission Number: 1544