Evolving graphical planner: Contextual global planning for vision-and-language navigation

The ability to perform effective planning is crucial for building an instruction-following agent. When navigating through a new environment, an agent is challenged with (1) connecting the natural language instructions with its progressively growing knowledge of the world; and (2) performing long-range planning and decision making in the form of effective exploration and error correction. Current methods are still limited on both fronts despite extensive efforts. In this paper, we introduce the Evolving Graphical Planner (EGP), a model that performs global planning for navigation based on raw sensory input. The model dynamically constructs a graphical representation, generalizes the action space to allow for more flexible decision making, and performs efficient planning on a proxy graph representation. We evaluate our model on a challenging Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task with photorealistic images, and achieve superior performance compared to previous navigation architectures. For instance, we achieve a 53% success rate on the test split of the Room-to-Room navigation task [1] through pure imitation learning, outperforming previous navigation architectures by up to 5%.