Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vihan Jain, Gabriel Magalhaes, Alexander Ku, Ashish Vaswani, Eugene Ie, Jason Baldridge


Abstract
Advances in learning and representations have reinvigorated work that connects language to other modalities. A particularly exciting direction is Vision-and-Language Navigation(VLN), in which agents interpret natural language instructions and visual scenes to move through environments and reach goals. Despite recent progress, current research leaves unclear how much of a role language under-standing plays in this task, especially because dominant evaluation metrics have focused on goal completion rather than the sequence of actions corresponding to the instructions. Here, we highlight shortcomings of current metrics for the Room-to-Room dataset (Anderson et al.,2018b) and propose a new metric, Coverage weighted by Length Score (CLS). We also show that the existing paths in the dataset are not ideal for evaluating instruction following because they are direct-to-goal shortest paths. We join existing short paths to form more challenging extended paths to create a new data set, Room-for-Room (R4R). Using R4R and CLS, we show that agents that receive rewards for instruction fidelity outperform agents that focus on goal completion.
Anthology ID:
P19-1181
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1862–1872
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1181
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1181
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vihan Jain, Gabriel Magalhaes, Alexander Ku, Ashish Vaswani, Eugene Ie, and Jason Baldridge. 2019. Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigation. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1862–1872, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigation (Jain et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1181.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1181.mp4