Speaking the Navigator’s Language: Trajectory-Grounded Instruction Translation for Frozen Aerial VLN Agents
arXiv:2610.10635v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aerial vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents are typically trained on detail-rich, trajectory-aligned commands, whereas users issue short, intent-driven instructions; on a frozen OpenFly navigator, this \emph{instruction gap} drops success rate (SR) from $31.03%$ to $11.33%$. To scale translator training, we prompt a language model with human-written style examples to convert original commands into paired, intent-centered Weak commands, which yield $15.27%$ SR. We introduce the \textbf{Trajectory-Grounded Instruction Translator (TGIT)}, a front-end that keeps the navigator frozen and translates Weak inputs into agent-executable commands by learning from its trajectory outcomes. The resulting Weak-trained translator raises Weak-input SR to $37.93%$ and transfers zero-shot to real human instructions ($11.33%{\rightarrow}32.51%$); it also improves held-out OpenFly ($4.95%{\rightarrow}20.79%$) and yields recovery on CityNav and AirVLN.