FOAM: A Follower-aware Speaker Model For Vision-and-Language Navigation

AbstractThe speaker-follower models have proven to be effective in vision-and-language navigation, where a speaker model is used to synthesize new instructions to augment the training data for a follower navigation model. However, in previous work, the speaker model is follower-agnostic and fails to take the state of the follower into consideration. In this paper, we present FOAM, a FOllower-Aware speaker Model that is constantly updated given the follower feedback, so that the generated instructions can be more suitable to the current learning state of the follower. Specifically, we optimize the speaker using a bi-level optimization framework and obtain its training signals by evaluating the follower on labeled data. Experimental results on the Room-to-Room and Room-across-Room datasets demonstrate that our methods can outperform strong baseline models across settings. Analyses also reveal that our generated instructions are of higher quality than the baselines.