CMMR-VLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation via Continual Multimodal Memory Retrieval

Abstract: Although LLMs are introduced into vision-and-language navigation (VLN) to improve instruction comprehension and generalization, existing LLM- based VLN lacks the ability to selectively recall and use relevant priori experiences to help navigation tasks, limiting their performance in long-horizon and unfamiliar scenarios. In this work, we propose CMMR-VLN (Continual Multimodal Memory Retrieval based VLN), a VLN framework that endows LLM agents with structured memory and reflection capabilities. Specifically, the CMMR-VLN constructs a multimodal experi- ence memory indexed by panoramic visual images and salient landmarks to retrieve relevant experiences during navigation, introduces a retrieved-augmented generation pipeline to mimick how experienced human navigators leverage priori knowledge, and incorporates a reflection-based memory update strategy that selectively stores complete successful paths and the key initial mistake in failure cases. Comprehensive tests illustrate average success rate improvements of 52.9%, 20.9% and 20.9%, and 200%, 50% and 50% over the NavGPT, the MapGPT, and the DiscussNav in simulation and real tests, respectively eluci- dating the great potential of the CMMR-VLN as a backbone VLN framework.