Counterfactual Cycle-Consistent Learning for Instruction Following and Generation in Vision-Language Navigation

Hanqing Wang, Wei Liang, Jianbing Shen, Luc Van Gool, Wenguan Wang*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

29 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Since the rise of vision-language navigation (VLN), great progress has been made in instruction following - building a follower to navigate environments under the guidance of instructions. However, far less attention has been paid to the inverse task: instruction generation - learning a speaker to generate grounded descriptions for navigation routes. Existing VLN methods train a speaker independently and often treat it as a data augmentation tool to strengthen the follower, while ignoring rich cross-task relations. Here we describe an approach that learns the two tasks simultaneously and exploits their intrinsic correlations to boost the training of each: the follower judges whether the speaker-created instruction explains the original navigation route correctly, and vice versa. Without the need of aligned instruction-path pairs, such cycle-consistent learning scheme is complementary to task-specific training targets defined on labeled data, and can also be applied over unlabeled paths (sampled without paired instructions). Another agent, called creator is added to generate counterfactual environments. It greatly changes current scenes yet leaves novel items - which are vital for the execution of original instructions - unchanged. Thus more informative training scenes are synthesized and the three agents compose a powerful VLN learning system. Extensive experiments on a standard benchmark show that our approach improves the performance of various follower models and produces accurate navigation instructions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2022
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages15450-15460
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781665469463
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2022 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: 19 Jun 202224 Jun 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Volume2022-June
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period19/06/2224/06/22

Keywords

  • Vision + language

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