ResearchResearch paperRobotics & Embodied AI · Reinforcement Learning · Safety & Alignment1 source · Oct 10, 2026

Successful but Unsafe: An Analytical Benchmark for Revealing Collisions in Vision-and-Language Navigation

We introduce VLN-Safe, a benchmark for analyzing collision safety under two complementary evaluation regimes: sliding, reflecting common VLN evaluation practice, and blocking, where collision-inducing actions prevent forward motion and more directly expose their consequences.

Key points

  • Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents are typically evaluated by whether they reach a target and how efficiently they follow an instructed route, yet these metrics provide little information about collision behavior.
  • Moreover, continuous VLN evaluation commonly uses a sliding regime, where an agent can slide along obstacles after a collision, potentially masking the effect of unsafe actions on navigation performance.
  • Motivated by these findings, we introduce a training-free collision guard that vetoes risky forward actions, executes an escape maneuver, and returns control to the original policy.
  • These results reveal a substantial gap between task success and collision-safe navigation and show that lightweight collision-aware intervention can improve both safety and navigation performance.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Successful but Unsafe: An Analytical Benchmark for Revealing Collisions in Vision-and-Language Navigation
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 10, 07:53 AM
    We introduce VLN-Safe, a benchmark for analyzing collision safety under two complementary evaluation regimes: sliding, reflecting common VLN evaluation practice, and blocking, where collision-inducing actions prevent forward motion and more directly expose their consequences.
    Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents are typically evaluated by whether they reach a target and how efficiently they follow an instructed route, yet these metrics provide little information about collision behavior.

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