SimpleVLN: Towards Simple and Frontier Vision-Language Navigation

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Article Summary

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires embodied agents to ground language in visual observations and make long-horizon decisions. Existing methods often address these demands through task-specific architectures. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) become increasingly capable, an important question remains: Have we truly unlocked the potential of native MLLMs for VLN before introducing task-specific architecture? We present SimpleVLN, an architecture-preserving framework developed through studies of navigation formulation, data construction, and optimization. At the formulation level, SimpleVLN combines single-turn decision inputs with fixed-budget global-local memory to efficiently use navigation history without unbounded context growth, while action chunks enable efficient output of multiple primitive actions per model invocation. For data construction, we combine expert demonstrations with policy-dependent DAgger experience and develop a scalable synthesis pipeline that generates large-scale tasks for reinforcement learning. At the optimization level, a progressive IL-DAgger-RL pipeline advances from action imitation to task-level outcome optimization. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of these three aspects. We instantiate SimpleVLN across multiple MLLM backbones and model sizes, demonstrating its generality. SimpleVLN achieves 76.7% and 80.1% success rates on the R2R-CE and RxR-CE splits, respectively, substantially outperforming existing methods. These results show that the navigation capabilities of native MLLMs can be effectively unlocked without task-specific architectural designs.

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