Ground Slow, Move Fast: A Dual-System Foundation Model for Generalizable Vision-and-Language Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces DualVLN, a dual-system foundation model for vision-and-language navigation that combines high-level reasoning with low-level control, improving robustness, real-time performance, and adaptability in complex environments.

Contribution

The paper presents the first dual-system VLN foundation model that integrates a global planner with a local policy, enhancing generalization and real-time navigation in dynamic settings.

Findings

Outperforms prior VLN methods on all benchmarks.

Demonstrates robust long-horizon planning in real-world tests.

Achieves real-time, adaptive navigation in dynamic environments.

Abstract

While recent large vision-language models (VLMs) have improved generalization in vision-language navigation (VLN), existing methods typically rely on end-to-end pipelines that map vision-language inputs directly to short-horizon discrete actions. Such designs often produce fragmented motions, incur high latency, and struggle with real-world challenges like dynamic obstacle avoidance. We propose DualVLN, the first dual-system VLN foundation model that synergistically integrates high-level reasoning with low-level action execution. System 2, a VLM-based global planner, "grounds slowly" by predicting mid-term waypoint goals via image-grounded reasoning. System 1, a lightweight, multi-modal conditioning Diffusion Transformer policy, "moves fast" by leveraging both explicit pixel goals and latent features from System 2 to generate smooth and accurate trajectories. The dual-system design enables robust real-time control and adaptive local decision-making in complex, dynamic environments. By decoupling training, the VLM retains its generalization, while System 1 achieves interpretable and effective local navigation. DualVLN outperforms prior methods across all VLN benchmarks and real-world experiments demonstrate robust long-horizon planning and real-time adaptability in dynamic environments.