Vision-and-language navigation based on history-aware cross-modal feature fusion in indoor environment

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is a challenging task that requires an agent to navigate an indoor environment using natural language instructions. Traditional VLN employs cross-modal feature fusion, where visual and textual information are combined to guide the agent’s navigation. However, incomplete use of perceptual information, scarcity of domain-specific training data, and diverse image and language inputs result in suboptimal performance. Herein, we propose a cross-modal feature fusion VLN history-aware information, that leverages an agent’s past experiences to make more informed navigation decisions. The regretful model and self-monitoring models are added, and the advantage actor critic(A2C) reinforcement learning algorithm is employed to improve the navigation success rate, reduce action redundancy, and shorten navigation paths. Subsequently, a data augmentation method based on speaker data is introduced to improve the model generalizability. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on the room-to-room (R2R) and room-for-room (R4R) benchmarks, and the experimental results demonstrate that, by comparison, the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods.