Generating Vision-Language Navigation Instructions Incorporated Fine-Grained Alignment Annotations

Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables intelligent agents to navigate environments by integrating visual perception and natural language instructions, yet faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of fine-grained cross-modal alignment annotations. Existing datasets primarily focus on global instruction-trajectory matching, neglecting sub-instruction-level and entity-level alignments critical for accurate navigation action decision-making. To address this limitation, we propose FCA-NIG, a generative framework that automatically constructs navigation instructions with dual-level fine-grained cross-modal annotations. In this framework, an augmented trajectory is first divided into sub-trajectories, which are then processed through GLIP-based landmark detection, crafted instruction construction, OFA-Speaker based R2R-like instruction generation, and CLIP-powered entity selection, generating sub-instruction-trajectory pairs with entity-landmark annotations. Finally, these sub-pairs are aggregated to form a complete instruction-trajectory pair. The framework generates the FCA-R2R dataset, the first large-scale augmentation dataset featuring precise sub-instruction-sub-trajectory and entity-landmark alignments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that training with FCA-R2R significantly improves the performance of multiple state-of-the-art VLN agents, including SF, EnvDrop, RecBERT, and HAMT. Incorporating sub-instruction-trajectory alignment enhances agents' state awareness and decision accuracy, while entity-landmark alignment further boosts navigation performance and generalization. These results highlight the effectiveness of FCA-NIG in generating high-quality, scalable training data without manual annotation, advancing fine-grained cross-modal learning in complex navigation tasks.