ResearchResearch paperRobotics & Embodied AI1 source · Oct 19, 2026

Revealing and Bridging the Physical Executability Gap in Vision-Language Navigation

We show that this assumption can fail: permissive contact models in current simulators may mask physically infeasible actions, creating a physical executability gap between semantic competence and embodied realization.

Key points

  • Continuous vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is typically evaluated by goal-reaching success, assuming it reflects an agent's ability to execute language-grounded behavior.
  • To bridge this gap, we introduce Visual-Semantic Traversability Alignment (VeSTA), a framework that aligns VLN policies with physically executable futures.
  • We define visual-semantic traversability as the ability to predict instruction-conditioned trajectories that are semantically valid, geometrically feasible, and physically robust.
  • Experiments on R2R and RxR reveal substantial dependence of existing VLN agents on simulator contact semantics.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Revealing and Bridging the Physical Executability Gap in Vision-Language Navigation
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 19, 02:36 AM
    We show that this assumption can fail: permissive contact models in current simulators may mask physically infeasible actions, creating a physical executability gap between semantic competence and embodied realization.
    Continuous vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is typically evaluated by goal-reaching success, assuming it reflects an agent's ability to execute language-grounded behavior.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

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