Lecture image placeholder

Premium content

Access to this content requires a subscription. You must be a premium user to view this content.

Monthly subscription - $9.99Pay per view - $4.99Access through your institutionLogin with Underline account
Need help?
Contact us
Lecture placeholder background

EMNLP 2025

November 09, 2025

Suzhou, China

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) poses significant challenges for agents to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex 3D environments. While recent progress has been driven by large-scale pre-training and data augmentation, current methods still struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios, particularly when complex spatial and temporal reasoning is required. In this work, we propose SkillNav, a modular framework that introduces structured, skill-based reasoning into Transformer-based VLN agents. Our method decomposes navigation into a set of interpretable atomic skills (e.g., Vertical Movement, Area and Region Identification, Stop and Pause), each handled by a specialized agent. To support targeted skill training without manual data annotation, we construct a synthetic dataset pipeline that generates diverse, linguistically natural, skill-specific instruction-trajectory pairs. We then introduce a novel training-free Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based router, which dynamically selects the most suitable agent at each time step by aligning sub-goals with visual observations and historical actions. SkillNav obtains competitive results on commonly used benchmarks, and establishes state-of-the-art generalization to the GSA-R2R, a benchmark with novel instruction styles and unseen environments.

Next from EMNLP 2025

Design Techniques for LLM-Powered Interactive Storytelling: A Case Study of the Dramamancer System
workshop paper

Design Techniques for LLM-Powered Interactive Storytelling: A Case Study of the Dramamancer System

EMNLP 2025

+3Yuqian SunMelissa RoemmeleMax Kreminski
Max Kreminski and 5 other authors

09 November 2025

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2026 Underline - All rights reserved