FloorPlan-VLN: A New Paradigm for Floor Plan Guided Vision-Language Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces FloorPlan-VLN, a new paradigm for vision-language navigation that leverages semantic floor plans as global spatial priors, significantly improving navigation success rates in complex indoor environments.

Contribution

It presents a new dataset and a novel method, FP-Nav, that effectively utilize floor plans for spatial reasoning in navigation tasks, outperforming existing baselines.

Findings

Over 60% improvement in navigation success rate

Robust performance under actuation drift and floor plan distortions

Validated effectiveness through real-world deployment

Abstract

Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task requires agents to follow verbose instructions, ignoring some potentially useful global spatial priors, limiting their capability to reason about spatial structures. Although human-readable spatial schematics (e.g., floor plans) are ubiquitous in real-world buildings, current agents lack the cognitive ability to comprehend and utilize them. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{FloorPlan-VLN}, a new paradigm that leverages structured semantic floor plans as global spatial priors to enable navigation with only concise instructions. We first construct the FloorPlan-VLN dataset, which comprises over 10k episodes across 72 scenes. It pairs more than 100 semantically annotated floor plans with Matterport3D-based navigation trajectories and concise instructions that omit step-by-step guidance. Then, we propose a simple yet effective method \textbf{FP-Nav} that uses a dual-view, spatio-temporally aligned video sequence, and auxiliary reasoning tasks to align observations, floor plans, and instructions. When evaluated under this new benchmark, our method significantly outperforms adapted state-of-the-art VLN baselines, achieving more than a 60\% relative improvement in navigation success rate. Furthermore, comprehensive noise modeling and real-world deployments demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of FP-Nav to actuation drift and floor plan distortions. These results validate the effectiveness of floor plan guided navigation and highlight FloorPlan-VLN as a promising step toward more spatially intelligent navigation.