VL-Nav: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Reasoning-based Vision-Language Navigation

Abstract

Navigating unseen, large-scale environments based on complex and abstract human instructions remains a formidable challenge for autonomous mobile robots. Addressing this requires robots to infer implicit semantics and efficiently explore large-scale task spaces. However, existing methods, ranging from end-to-end learning to foundation model-based modular architectures, often lack the capability to decompose complex tasks or employ efficient exploration strategies, leading to robot aimless wandering or target recognition failures. To address these limitations, we propose VL-Nav, a neuro-symbolic (NeSy) vision-language navigation system. The proposed system intertwines neural reasoning with symbolic guidance through two core components: (1) a NeSy task planner that leverages a symbolic 3D scene graph and image memory system to enhance the vision language models' (VLMs) neural reasoning capabilities for task decomposition and replanning; and (2) a NeSy exploration system that couples neural semantic cues with the symbolic heuristic function to efficiently gather the task-related information while minimizing unnecessary repeat travel during exploration. Validated on the DARPA TIAMAT Challenge navigation tasks, our system achieved an 83.4% success rate (SR) in indoor environments and 75% in outdoor scenarios. VL-Nav achieved an 86.3% SR in real-world experiments, including a challenging 483-meter run. Finally, we validate the system with complex instructions in a 3D multi-floor scenario.