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Gengze Zhou

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3 papers

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ICRA Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Ground-Level Viewpoint Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

Zerui Li
Gengze Zhou
Haodong Hong
Yanyan Shao
Wenqi Lyu
Yanyuan Qiao
Qi Wu 0001

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) empowers agents to associate time-sequenced visual observations with corresponding instructions to make sequential decisions. However, dealing with visually diverse scenes or transitioning from simulated environments to real-world deployment is still challenging. In this paper, we address the mismatch between human-centric instructions and quadruped robots with a lowheight field of view, proposing a Ground-level Viewpoint Navigation (GVNav) approach to mitigate this issue. This work represents the first attempt to highlight the generalization gap in VLN across varying heights of visual observation in realistic robot deployments. Our approach leverages weighted historical observations as enriched spatiotemporal contexts for instruction following, effectively managing feature collisions within cells by assigning appropriate weights to identical features across different viewpoints. This enables low-height robots to overcome challenges such as visual obstructions and perceptual mismatches. Additionally, we transfer the connectivity graph from the HM3D and Gibson datasets as an extra resource to enhance spatial priors and a more comprehensive representation of real-world scenarios, leading to improved performance and generalizability of the waypoint predictor in real-world environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Groundlevel Viewpoint Navigation (GVnav) approach significantly improves performance in both simulated environments and real-world deployments with quadruped robots.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models

Gengze Zhou
Yicong Hong
Qi Wu

Trained with an unprecedented scale of data, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit the emergence of significant reasoning abilities from model scaling. Such a trend underscored the potential of training LLMs with unlimited language data, advancing the development of a universal embodied agent. In this work, we introduce the NavGPT, a purely LLM-based instruction-following navigation agent, to reveal the reasoning capability of GPT models in complex embodied scenes by performing zero-shot sequential action prediction for vision-and-language navigation (VLN). At each step, NavGPT takes the textual descriptions of visual observations, navigation history, and future explorable directions as inputs to reason the agent's current status, and makes the decision to approach the target. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate NavGPT can explicitly perform high-level planning for navigation, including decomposing instruction into sub-goals, integrating commonsense knowledge relevant to navigation task resolution, identifying landmarks from observed scenes, tracking navigation progress, and adapting to exceptions with plan adjustment. Furthermore, we show that LLMs is capable of generating high-quality navigational instructions from observations and actions along a path, as well as drawing accurate top-down metric trajectory given the agent's navigation history. Despite the performance of using NavGPT to zero-shot R2R tasks still falling short of trained models, we suggest adapting multi-modality inputs for LLMs to use as visual navigation agents and applying the explicit reasoning of LLMs to benefit learning-based models. Code is available at: https://github.com/GengzeZhou/NavGPT.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

WebVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation on Websites

Qi Chen
Dileepa Pitawela
Chongyang Zhao
Gengze Zhou
Hsiang-Ting Chen
Qi Wu

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task aims to enable AI agents to accurately understand and follow natural language instructions to navigate through real-world environments, ultimately reaching specific target locations. We recognise a promising opportunity to extend VLN to a comparable navigation task that holds substantial significance in our daily lives, albeit within the virtual realm: navigating websites on the Internet. This paper proposes a new task named Vision-and-Language Navigation on Websites (WebVLN), where we use question-based instructions to train an agent, emulating how users naturally browse websites. Unlike the existing VLN task that only pays attention to vision and instruction (language), the WebVLN agent further considers underlying web-specific content like HTML, which could not be seen on the rendered web pages yet contain rich visual and textual information. Toward this goal, we contribute a dataset, WebVLN-v1, and introduce a novel approach called Website-aware VLN Network (WebVLN-Net), which is built upon the foundation of state-of-the-art VLN techniques. Experimental results show that WebVLN-Net outperforms current VLN and web-related navigation methods. We believe that the introduction of the newWebVLN task and its dataset will establish a new dimension within the VLN domain and contribute to the broader vision-and-language research community. Code is available at: https://github.com/WebVLN/WebVLN.

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