Title: Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments,
Abstract: A robot that can carry out a natural-language instruction has been a dream
since before the Jetsons cartoon series imagined a life of leisure mediated by
a fleet of attentive robot helpers. It is a dream that remains stubbornly
distant. However, recent advances in vision and language methods have made
incredible progress in closely related areas. This is significant because a
robot interpreting a natural-language navigation instruction on the basis of
what it sees is carrying out a vision and language process that is similar to
Visual Question Answering. Both tasks can be interpreted as visually grounded
sequence-to-sequence translation problems, and many of the same methods are
applicable. To enable and encourage the application of vision and language
methods to the problem of interpreting visually-grounded navigation
instructions, we present the Matterport3D Simulator -- a large-scale
reinforcement learning environment based on real imagery. Using this simulator,
which can in future support a range of embodied vision and language tasks, we
provide the first benchmark dataset for visually-grounded natural language
navigation in real buildings -- the Room-to-Room (R2R) dataset.