Hierarchical Spatial Proximity Reasoning for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Most Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) algorithms tend to make decision errors, primarily due to a lack of visual common sense and insufficient reasoning capabilities. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Hierarchical Spatial Proximity Reasoning (HSPR) model. Firstly, we design a Scene Understanding Auxiliary Task (SUAT) to assist the agent in constructing a knowledge base of hierarchical spatial proximity for reasoning navigation. Specifically, this task utilizes panoramic views and object features to identify regions in the navigation environment and uncover the adjacency relationships between regions, objects, and region-object pairs. Secondly, we dynamically construct a semantic topological map through agent-environment interactions and propose a Multi-step Reasoning Navigation Algorithm (MRNA) based on the map. This algorithm continuously plans various feasible paths from one region to another, utilizing the constructed proximity knowledge base, enabling more efficient exploration. Additionally, we introduce a Proximity Adaptive Attention Module (PAAM) and Residual Fusion Method (RFM) to enable the model to obtain more accurate navigation decision confidence. Finally, we conduct experiments on publicly available datasets including REVERIE, SOON, R2R, and R4R to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.