# Cursor Chat: ai-agent-book

## Metadata
- **Project**: ai-agent-book
- **Path**: `/Users/boj`
- **Date**: 2025-10-02 21:32:34
- **Session ID**: `fb2164ce-fe6b-455a-a1d2-3ec57213b4f3`

## Conversation

### 👤 You

根据论文内容，修正文中对 V-IRL 的描述：

V-IRL: Grounding Virtual Intelligence in Real Life
Jihan Yang1* Runyu Ding1 Ellis Brown2 Xiaojuan Qi1 Saining Xie2
1The University of Hong Kong 2New York University
https://virl-platform.github.io
“Seamless schedules,
signature service!”
“Beep beep! Clean
street ahead!”
San Francisco New York London Paris Tokyo Melbourne
Buenos Aires Rio de Janeiro Lagos Mumbai Hong Kong
“Building the future, one
blueprint at a time!”
“Dash, deliver, done!”
“From star-ratings to
your dining!” “New city, new chapter,
endless curiosity!”
“Lost in wonder.
Show me the way?”
Your perfect home
awaits here!
Figure 1. V-IRL agents leverage real-world geospatial information and street view imagery to navigate urban terrains, execute complex
tasks, and interact in real-time scenarios. From recommending relevant destinations to assessing city infrastructure to collaboratively
giving & following verbal directions—we develop agents that illustrate V-IRL’s current capabilities, flexibility, and utility. Above all else,
we present a flexible platform for researchers to harness abundant data from across the globe to create and test diverse autonomous agents.
Abstract
There is a sensory gulf between the Earth that humans
inhabit and the digital realms in which modern AI agents
are created. To develop AI agents that can sense, think, and
act as flexibly as humans in real-world settings, it is imperative to bridge the realism gap between the digital and
physical worlds. How can we embody agents in an environment as rich and diverse as the one we inhabit, without
the constraints imposed by real hardware and control? Towards this end, we introduce V-IRL: a platform that enables
agents to scalably interact with the real world in a virtual
yet realistic environment. Our platform serves as a playground for developing agents that can accomplish various
practical tasks and as a vast testbed for measuring progress
in capabilities spanning perception, decision-making, and
interaction with real-world data across the entire globe.
*Work conducted during a visit to NYU.
1. Introduction
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has breathed
new life into autonomous agent research by offering a universal interface for diverse capabilities, ranging from basic
reasoning to complex planning and tool use [78]. While
these developments are promising, most of these agents
remain confined to text-based environments or simplistic simulations. Visual components in existing agents are
either rudimentary—such as simulated tabletop environments [12, 31]—or rely on abstracted representations using
ground-truth APIs [30, 73]. Furthermore, the prevalent visual models employed by these agents are trained on photogenic, object-centric Internet images, which fail to capture
the unpredictability and diversity of real-world scenes.
This paper aims to bridge this gap between AI agents
and the sensory world by grounding them in rich, realworld environments—a crucial step towards developing autonomous agents that can effectively operate in real-life sce1
arXiv:2402.03310v3 [cs.AI] 18 Jul 2024
narios. Our novel setting for AI agents necessitatesrich sensory grounding and perception: virtual embodiment within
cities around the globe using real visual and geospatial data.
To this end, we introduce V-IRL, a versatile platform for
building and testing virtual agents within this novel virtualreal-world setting. V-IRL harnesses the power of mapping and street view data, enabling agents to navigate realworld locations, access up-to-date information about their
surroundings, and perform practical tasks. With geospatial
coordinates at its core, V-IRL is flexible and extensible, integrating with arbitrary geospatial platforms and APIs. Moreover, V-IRL opens up a vast sea of visual data, allowing a
simple and extensible way for researchers to evaluate vision
models on realistic data distributions.
We demonstrate the versatility and adaptability of V-IRL
by developing a series of diverse exemplar agents, each
solving a unique and practical task. As these agents hinge
upon foundational language and vision models, it is critical
to evaluate these models within this setting and their impact
on agent performance. We leverage the vast data available
through our platform to develop global scale benchmarks
measuring the performance of underlying vision models
on images from diverse geographic and cultural contexts—
evaluating their adaptability to shifting environmental, architectural, and language-specific elements. Furthermore,
we evaluate the contributions of models to agent performance on challenging tasks. Our results illustrate the potential of V-IRL in bridging the gap between virtual agents
and visually rich real-world environments, paving the way
for future research in this direction.
In summary, our contributions are:
• V-IRL: an open-source platform for building and testing
agents in a real-world setting that necessitates rich sensory grounding and perception—embodiment using real
geospatial data and street-view imagery.
• Development of diverse exemplar agents that showcase
the platform’s versatility and adaptability.
• Global benchmarks measuring the performance of foundational language and vision models (1) in isolation using our platform’s real-world data and (2) on end-to-end
agent performance in challenging tasks. In addition, we
discuss the robustness of “open-world” vision models
to real-world data from across the globe.
We are excited to see how the research community will
leverage V-IRL to develop and test agents that can understand and interact with the real world.
2. Related Work
Here, we ground V-IRL to three streams of research.
AI Agents. Agents are autonomous entities capable of perceiving their environment and acting to achieve goals [75].
Historically, agent development has leveraged symbolic and
reinforcement learning methods [10, 33, 54], which face issues of scalability and real-world utility. In contrast, the
new wave of LLM-driven agents overcomes these challenges with text as a universal interface, enabling natural
human interaction and adaptability to various tasks [55,
68, 69, 74, 84]. Moreover, these models equip agents
with complex capabilities, such as tool use and collaboration [29, 38, 56, 61, 73, 77, 92]. Yet a critical limitation
persists: the agents in this new wave are entirely text-based,
devoid of any tangible connection to the visual or sensory
aspects of the real world.
Embodied AI. Embodied AI studies intelligent agents &
robots perceiving and interacting with their environment. A
significant challenge in this field is the acquisition of large
quantities of realistic data. Consequently, robots are primarily trained in simulated environments [13, 51, 60, 79, 80]
to develop skills such as navigation [4, 5, 14] and manipulation [28, 86]. Recent advancements in LLMs [2, 6, 72]
have enabled embodied agents to perform long-horizon and
open-end tasks in game-engines [30, 31, 43, 50, 66] or human rooms [11, 12, 22, 32, 42]. However, the diversity of
tasks and data is still too narrow and simplistic to enable
them to operate flexibly in diverse real-world environments.
Open-World Computer Vision. Motivated by the success of vision-language models [3, 8, 57, 87] pre-trained
on large-scale web-crawled data [18, 35, 62, 67, 71, 81],
open-world computer vision has received increasing attention in recent years [21, 26, 36, 37, 40, 52, 82, 83, 90].
However, images and benchmarks sourced from the Internet [7, 20, 24, 34, 36, 59] are unavoidably biased towards
specific distributions rather than truly reflecting the real
world [58]. Because they are trained and evaluated entirely
on Internet data, existing “open-world” models are effectively more open-Internet than open-world.
3. Virtual Intelligence in Real Life
To demonstrate the versatility of V-IRL, we use it to instantiate several exemplar agents in our virtual real-world environment. In this section, we engage these agents with tasks
that highlight various capabilities of our platform. In Sec. 4,
we discuss the technical details of our platform and how it
enables agents to interact with the real world.
For illustration, we give V-IRL agents character metadata, including an 8-bit avatar, a name, a short bio, and an
intention they are trying to accomplish. More concretely,
agents are defined by pipelines that use this character metadata along with our platform’s API and pretrained models to
address complex tasks (see Sec. 4). Here we provide a highlevel overview of the tasks, highlight the V-IRL capabilities
they require, and visualize the agents solving them.
We highlight the specific V-IRL capabilities being employed throughout using tags and corresponding colored
underlines:
ENVMap → action,
LM
LLM → reasoning,
CV
Vision → perception, &
COL
Colab → collaboration.
2
3.1. Earthbound Agents
V-IRL agents inhabit virtual representations of real cities
around the globe. At the core of this representation are geographic coordinates corresponding to points on the Earth’s
surface. Using these coordinates, V-IRL allows virtual
agents to ground themselves in the real world using maps,
street view imagery, information about nearby destinations,
and additional data from arbitrary geospatial APIs.
Route Optimizer
ENV
Map
Name: Peng Age: 21 Loc: NYC
Bio: Originally from Chengdu, Sichuan, Peng is a student at PKU. He just
arrived for a semester abroad at NYC, and is couch surfing until he gets settled.
Intention: Peng needs to visit five locations around the city: his University
Card Center, Residence Hall, Research Center, Library, and Student Center.
Task: Given a starting address and a list of waypoints, plan the
shortest route to all waypoints and then follow it on street view.
Takeaway: V-IRL instantiates agents with real geospatial information, and enables useful tasks like route optimization.
Peng needs to visit several locations throughout the city to
get documents signed for registration as a visiting student. . .
Leveraging Geolocation & Mapping capabilities, Peng
saves 7 minutes by walking along the shortest path as opposed to in order waypoint visitation as shown in Fig. 2.
START END
1
2
3
4
START
END
3
1
2
4
42.7 min, 3.1 km 36.0 min, 2.6 km 9.7 min, 2.9 km
4
2
3 1
END
START
Sequential routing Shortest path routing Shortest path routing
Figure 2. Finding the shortest path for Peng to travel to five places.
3.2. Language-Driven Agents
To tackle more complex tasks, we follow the pattern of
language-driven agents [78]. LLMs enable agents to flexibly reason, plan, and use external tools & APIs.
Place Recommender
ENV
Map
LM
LLM
Name: Aria Age: 26 Loc: NYC
Bio: A 3rd year graduate student who loves to try new restaurants. She is
always looking for new places to try, and shares her favorite spots on her blog!
Intention: Pick out a lunch spot that Peng might like.
Name: Vivek Age: 35 Loc: NYC
Bio: A tech-savvy estate agent who combines his local knowledge with online
tools like Zillow to find the perfect homes for his clients in the bustling city.
Intention: Help Peng find a place to live for the semester.
Task: Given specific location, background, and intention, synthesize reviews of nearby businesses to provide a recommendation.
Takeaway: V-IRL exposes rich real-world information to agents
that they can use for real-world tasks.
Peng is starving for some lunch but doesn’t know where to
eat. . . Luckily, he met a nice grad student Aria during his errands who might be able to help him find a good spot. . .
Personalized Rating: 8 👍
Personalized Rating: 2.5👎
Personalized Rating: 7.5👍
夸父炸串 Kwa Food
Deep Fried Skewers
Tartinery Café – Bar
| Greenwich Village Dos Toros Taqueria
Mexican START
Personalized Rating: 8 👍
Personalized Rating: 2.5 👎
Personalized Rating: 7.5 👍
夸父炸串 Kwa Food
Deep Fried Skewers
Tartinery Café – Bar
| Greenwich Village Dos Toros Taqueria
Mexican START
Aria searches for possible
restaurants nearby. She then
synthesizes public reviews
to make final recommendations via GPT-4. As Peng
is new to the city and originally from Sichuan, she recommends a spicy Chinese joint
Kwa Food Deep Fried Skewers to give him a taste of home.
Peng hires Vivek to help him find an apartment in East Village, Jersey City, or Long Island City for $1k–$3k per month
close to a gym, supermarket, and public transit. . .
Recommendations
Personalized rating: 8/10 👍
The apartment is well-located near a
supermarket and gym, which aligns with
Peng's lifestyle. Multiple bus stations are
nearby, but the lack of a close subway
station may affect his commute.
"address": 155 Washington St,
Jersey City, NJ 07302, ” rent":
$2643, "type": Apartment, ”sqft":
571, "bedrooms": 0, "bathrooms":
1, "year built": 1992,
Personalized rating: 7.5/10 👍
The apartment is well-located with easy
access to supermarkets, public transport,
and a gym, which aligns with Peng's
requirements. However, the price may
not be cost-effective for a student.
Rental Information
"address": 42-18 28th St, Unit
12E, New York, NY 11101,
”rent": $2904, "type": Apartment,
”sqft": 450, "bedrooms": 0,
"bathrooms": 1,
"address": 37-14 32nd St, Unit
508, New York, NY 11101,
”rent": $1986, "type": Apartment,
”sqft": 800, "bedrooms": 1,
"bathrooms": 1,
Personalized rating: 2/10 👎
The estate lacks nearby supermarkets,
bus, subway stations, and gyms, which
are essential for Peng's requirements.
Vivek uses real estate APIs to find potential apartments in
Peng’s desired regions
and price range. For
each candidate, he researches its proximity to the places Peng
cares about. Synthesizing these factors, Vivek provides a holistic rating and accompanying reasoning using GPT-4. His top recommendation is a cost-effective 1 bedroom apartment for $1986/mo,
which is close to a supermarket, 2 bus stations, and a gym.
3.3. Visually Grounded Agents
Although language-driven agents can address some realworld tasks using external tools, their reliance solely on
text-based information limits their applicability to tasks
where visual grounding is required. In contrast, real sensory
input is integral to many daily human activities—allowing a
deep connection to and understanding of the world around
us. Agents can leverage street view imagery through the
V-IRL platform to visually ground themselves in the real
world—opening up a wide range of perception-driven tasks.
Urban Assistance Robot
ENV
Map
CV
Vision
Name: RX-399 Age: Unk. Loc: HK/NYC
Bio: This urban robot’s advanced object detection, localization, and navigational telemetry systems allow it to perform perceptive tasks in busy city streets.
Intention: Report the locations of trash bins to the sanitation dept.
Task: Travel along a specified route and detect instances of a specified object (e.g., trash bins, hydrants, benches, etc.).
Takeaway: V-IRL agents can use perceptive input to understand
and interact with their environment.
RX-399 is a state-of-the-art robot agent with advanced navigation and sensing capabilities. Its manufacturer is running
a pilot program with sanitation departments in Hong Kong
and New York City to assess its readiness for garbage duty. . .
RX-399 navigates along pre-defined city routes, tagging all
trash bins using its open-world detector and geolocation
module as depicted in Fig. 4. RX-399 can actively adjust
its camera pose to the optimal view for each potential ob3
Hydrant
Hydrant Bench Bench
Trash bin Trash bin Trash bin Trash bin
Figure 3. Imani’s visualization of trash bins, fire hydrants, & park benches in NYC’s Central Park using data collected by RX-399.
ject thanks to our interactive embodied environment and the
sensor-rich visual input. During the pilot in Hong Kong,
RX-399 locates eight trash bins, correctly identifying five
but overlooking one. In New York, it accurately detects all
five trash bins but mistakenly reports two mailboxes.
NYC
Hong Kong
Figure 4. Portions of RX-399’s system records in HK and NYC.
RX-399 can avoid double-counting previously seen objects by using feature matching to check for duplicates
among prior detections (see Fig. 5).
Figure 5. RX-399 avoids double-counting trash cans by identifying duplicates across different viewpoints using feature matching.
Urban Planner
ENV
Map
CV
Vision
Name: Imani Age: 42 Loc: NYC
Bio: A sustainable urban development graduate, Imani is passionate about
maintaining a harmonious balance between nature and urban ecosystems.
Intention: Use RX-399 to collect first-person data for her studies.
Task: Record the location of all instances of any specified objects
(e.g., trash bins, hydrants, benches, etc.) in a specified region.
Takeaway: V-IRL enables realistic open-world applications requiring vast geospatial and first-person visual information.
Imani needs to analyze the distribution of trash bins, fire hydrants, and park benches in New York’s Central Park for a
project with the NYC Parks & Recreation department. . .
Imani sets routes spanning Central Park and objects of interest for RX-399, who traverses the routes and records all
detected instances. After RX-399 finishes its route, Imani
analyzes the collected data at different levels of detail. As
depicted in Fig. 3, the coarsest level shows general distributions of trash bins, hydrants, and benches in the park. Imani
can also zoom in to specific regions, where lighter colors
represent positions with more unique instances identified.
The following table presents RX-399’s counting report:
Category Trash Bin Fire Hydrant Park Bench∗
Count 1059 727 1015
Table 1. RX-399’s counting report in Central Park, New York City.
(
∗Note: contiguous benches counted as one instance).
By retrieving geotagged sensory-rich data within RX-399,
Imani can also inspect the detection results for each object
to help her verify the reliability of RX-399’s reports as illustrated by the bottom level in Fig. 3.
4
Intentional Explorer
ENV
Map
LM
LLM
CV
Vision
Name: Hiro Age: 22 Loc: HK
Bio: A seasoned traveler, Hiro thrives in unknown territories. He enjoys getting lost in new places instead of following the travel guide.
Intention: Hiro is looking for an authentic lunch spot that is not too spicy.
Task: Explore on foot (in street view) looking for a destination that
fulfills a certain intention (e.g., lunch, shopping, etc.)
Takeaway: Agents can utilize visual detectors, VLMs and LLMs
to iteratively perceive, decide, and interact in the environment.
Hiro is starting a new journey in Hong Kong. He decides to
explore without a specific destination in mind, looking for a
good local lunch spot with food that’s not too spicy. . .
As depicted in Fig. 6, starting at , Hiro walks down the
street and encounters the first intersection. Thanks to the
interactive and sensory-rich environment, he can adjust his
pose to fetch street views for each possible path. Using
VQA on these views, he decides to turn left:
Residential buildings on the left road indicate cozy and
family-run local food. . . A better choice than the others!
Then, after exploring for a block, he encounters the second
intersection where he looks around and decides to turn right:
Looks like there are some local food spots this way. . .
After a few steps, Hiro finds “A One Chinese Noodles 阿一
豬扒酸辣米線” using his open-world detector. He retrieves
information, ratings, and reviews for the restaurant using
our platform, which connects street views to places. Hiro
ultimately decides to pass on it and keep exploring because:
Most reviews mention the spicy pork chop noodles. . .
Finally, at the end of the block , Hiro discovers another
lunch spot called “Xintianfa 新天發”. He decides to dine
there after reading numerous online reviews praising its authentic cuisine and diverse menu.
[ACTION 2]
“I should turn right.”
restaurant
[ACTION 3]
“I’ll pass. Keep exploring.”
[ACTION 1]
“I should turn left.”
restaurant
[EXPLORATION ENDS]
“Let’s dine here!”
[EXPLORATION STARTS]
“Let‘s grab a bite to eat, I’m hungry.”
A One
阿⼀豬扒酸辣⽶綫
Chinese Noodles
新天發
Chinese Takeout
Figure 6. Visualization for Hiro’s lunch exploration in HK.
3.4. Collaborative Agents
Humans often work together to solve complex real-world
tasks. This collaboration promotes efficiency and effectiveness by decomposing a complex task into simpler sub-tasks,
allowing each to be handled by an expert in its domain.
Grounded in the world via our platform, V-IRL agents can
leverage geospatial data and street view imagery to collaborate with other agents as well as with human users.
3.4.1 Agent-Agent Collaboration
As with previous agents, collaborative agents are designed
for specific tasks; however, they can handle objectives beyond their expertise through collaboration with each other.
Tourist
ENV
Map
LM
LLM
CV
Vision
COL
Colab
Name: Ling Age: 25 Loc: NYC/SF/HK
Bio: Ling is a spirited traveler from Taipei who is always eager to explore new
cities and cultures. She is unafraid of asking locals for help when she’s lost!
Intention: NYC: find gifts for friends back home; go to a famous restaurant.
SF: find a store to repair a broken iPhone. HK: try some authentic local food.
Task: (i) Ask a nearby Local agent for directions to a specific location. The Locals will preview the route on the map and in streetview
and then provide walking directions in natural language, mentioning
major intersections and landmarks.
(ii) Follow these directions in streetview, and if lost, ask
another Local agent for assistance.
Takeaway: Agents can collaborate to solve complex tasks that
are beyond their individual expertise.
Ling travels to cities around the world. She seeks out authentic experiences and is always unafraid to ask for help from
Locals whenever she finds herself lost. . .
After obtaining route descriptions from Locals, Ling starts
her journey—as shown in Fig. 7. Grounded in our embodied platform, Ling can adjust her pose and identify visual
landmarks along the streets using open-world recognition
and her map. Correctly recognizing these landmarks helps
GPT-4 to make correct decisions about where to change direction, move forward, and stop, as seen in the top two New
York City cases in Fig. 7. The success of these decisions
made by GPT-4 relies on the real-sensory input for visual
grounding and the interactive environment from V-IRL.
Nevertheless, Ling may occasionally fail to find the destination. In the bottom left San Francisco example in Fig. 7,
Ling passes by the Apple Store because only its stainless
steel wall is visible from her viewpoint. In the bottom right
Hong Kong example, Ling mistakes another restaurant for
her destination and stops prematurely. Fortunately, when
she makes these mistakes, Ling can ask another Local agent
for new directions and start another round of navigation,
which eventually leads her to the destination.
5
I still can’t find the Apple
Store. Maybe I should find
some more help…
Hmm. I don’t see the Apple
Store on my right. Maybe
it’s a bit further ahead? Ahh, I see the Apple
Store on my left now!
You just went past the
Apple Store. You need
to turn around. 💬
Oh no, my iPhone
screen just cracked!
There‘s an Apple Store just
a short walk from here. I
can guide you there: ⭐
START
⭐ Try 1: First, turn around and head west. Continue straight until you reach the
intersection, with a Starbucks on your left. Next, turn left to head south. Walk a
bit further, and your destination, Apple Union Square, will be on your right.
💬 Try 2: Turn around and head north. Walk straight for a short distance until
you reach the intersection. You will see the Apple Union Square, on your left.
San Francisco
There are two restaurants
on my left. I’m guessing
one of them is Ka Hing?
I eat at Ka Hing
every day! ⭐
Is Ka Hing
Restaurant here?
No, you should keep
walking to the west. 💬
Any good burger spots
around here?
Black Tap is worth checking out!
I'll tell you how to get there: ⭐
Arrived!
START
⭐ First, turn right to face southeast and walk a short distance until you reach
the next intersection. You should see Famous Ben’s Pizza on your left. Next, turn
right to head southwest. Continue walking for a while until the next
intersection. Janovic Paint & Decorating Center SoHo should be behind you on
your right. Finally, turn right again to face northwest and walk just a bit further.
Your destination, Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer - SoHo, will be on your left.
NYC
I’ve found Ka
Hing, finally!
Is there a local
restaurant you’d
recommend?
START
⭐ Try 1: First, turn to south and walk until you reach the intersection. You will
notice the McDonald on your left front. Then, take a right turn, and continue
walking west. Proceed until you see Ka Hing Restaurant on your left-hand side.
NYC
Hong Kong
Where’s a good place to buy
some gifts for my friends?
The MoMA Design Store is
an excellent option! Let me
tell you how to get there: ⭐
I’ve found the
MoMA Store!
START
⭐ First, turn left to face northwest and walk a short distance until you reach the
next intersection, with Prince St in front of you. Next, make a sharp left turn to
head southwest. Continue straight for a while until you reach the next
intersection, where you'll see Aritzia on your left front. Finally, make a sharp left
turn to head southeast and walk a bit further. You will find your destination, the
MoMA Design Store, on your left.
💬 Try 2: Facing west, walk a short distance until you spot Ka Hing Restaurant on
your left.
McDonald’s
麥當勞
Fast Food $
Ka Hing
嘉興餐廳
Black Tap Cra6 Burgers
& Beer – SoHo
American - $$
Famous Ben’s Pizza
Starbucks
Apple Union Square
Electronics Store
MoMA Design Store
Gi5 Shop
Aritzia
Women’s clothing store
N
N
N N
Figure 7. Ling and Local collaboration examples. Trajectories in red and green mean Ling’s first and second attempts, respectively.
6
Energy Hunger Pain Joy Stress Sadness
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Morning walk in the Washington Square Park.
10:00 - 10:52
09:00 - 10:00
14:00 - 14:28
Travel from Washington Square Park to The Cloisters.
Explore The Cloisters and the surrounding Fort Tryon Park.
12:30 - 13:30
10:52 - 12:30
Having food in Jochy‘s Cafe near Fort Tryon Park.
14:28 - 16:00
Travel from Jochy‘s Cafe to the Little Red Lighthouse.
Visit Little Red Lighthouse and enjoy views of the Hudson River.
Travel from the Little Red Lighthouse to Wave Hill. 16:00 - 17:06
Explore the gardens and art exhibitions at Wave Hill.
Travel from Wave Hill to the Riverdale neighborhood. 19:00 - 19:13
Having food in Floridita Restaurant, Riverdale.
Travel from Floridita Restaurant in Riverdale to the university.
19:13 - 20:00
20:00 - 20:40
Interactive Concierge
Budget
$120
$117.25
$92.25
$72.25
$69.5
$69.5
$64.5
$54.5
$52.5
$22.5
$19.75
$120
1
5
7 6
4
2
3
8
START 17:06 - 19:00
Figure 8. The Perfect Day Itinerary: Crafted by Diego, our iterative concierge agent, this schedule is meticulously tailored, accounting for
your mental and physical well-being and budget variations as your day unfolds.
Geo: [40.8647205, -73.9325163]
👍Rating: 7.2
Geo: [40.8653388, -73.9322499]
👍Rating : 6.5
Geo: [40.8609142,-73.9324818]
👎 Rating: 4.2
Geo: [40.8642401,-73.9325958]
👎Rating: 3.5
Geo: [40.8649162,-73.9311561]
👍Rating : 7.5
Figure 9. Diego traverses regions of interest to find scenic locations to add to your itinerary.
3.4.2 Human-Agent Collaboration
Grounded in the same environment we humans inhabit, VIRL agents can collaborate with and assist real human users.
Interactive Concierge
ENV
Map
LM
LLM
CV
Vision
COL
Colab
Name: Diego Age: 62 Loc: NYC
Bio: Diego is an expert concierge at a hotel. He’s a master at creating intricate itineraries and providing valuable local advice.
Intention: Plan personalized and practical itinerary for customer!
Task: Given a user’s location, background, and intention for a day,
plan a full itinerary balancing their mental/physical state & budget.
Takeaway: V-IRL agents can collaborate with users to solve
complex tasks that require understanding the user’s internal state.
As a university student in NYC, you are excited to spend a
day exploring lesser-known and tranquil places. Your friend
recommended Diego, who is known for his professionalism
in planning practical and personalized itineraries.
As depicted in Fig. 8, Diego’s itinerary is tailored to your
(the user’s) needs. Diego not only considers your physical
and mental interoception status, budget for each activity, but
also anticipates your status changes and cost when you follow each event. He is able to take into account real travel
times from the V-IRL platform and select suitable destinations by collaborating with another recommendation agent.
In contrast, Fig. 10 shows that a simpler “ungrounded”
LLM-only concierge agent is unable to consider the real disSingle pass results
Morning walk at The High Line. 08:00 - 9:00
Breakfast at a local café in Chelsea.
Subway ride from Chelsea to Green-Wood Cemetery.
12:45 - 13:45
10:00 - 10:30
Explore Green-Wood Cemetery.
14:00 - 15:30
Lunch at a quiet restaurant in Brooklyn.
Visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Travel from Brooklyn Botanic Garden to Wave Hill. 15:30 - 16:00
Stroll around Wave Hill.
16:00 - 18:00
Dinner at a cozy restaurant in Riverdale.
Travel back to the university.
18:15 - 19:00
19:00 - 20:00
10:30 - 12:30
09:15 - 10:00
START
1 2
3
4
5
6
Figure 10. An ungrounded LLM-only concierge agent’s itinerary.
tance and travel time between locations without access to VIRL, resulting in an impractical itinerary. For example, lacking real geospatial information, the ungrounded concierge
allocates only 30 minutes for travel between the “Brooklyn Botanic Garden” and “Wave Hill” in the Bronx, which
actually requires 60–100 minutes*. The hallucinated travel
times overlook geospatial realities and result in a plan with
excessively distant destinations.
Also, as shown in Fig. 11, you can intervene in Diego’s
*(per Google Maps https://maps.app.goo.gl/SW1r5GSx3ZVo7BTr7).
7
planning process by adjusting your interoceptive status or
by providing verbal feedback. In response, Diego promptly
revises his original plan to accommodate your demands, and
re-estimates your state changes after his revision.
35%
Revised Plan 2:
Travel from the Little Red Lighthouse back to the university.
16:00 - 17:20
30% 5% $66.75
0%
0%
10%
0%
25%
20%
80%
70%
14:28 - 16:00 Visit Little Red Lighthouse and enjoy views of the Hudson River.
Original Plan:
Travel from the Little Red Lighthouse to Wave Hill.
16:00 - 17:06
Revised Plan 1:
Eat at Buunni Coffee near Little Red Lighthouse for a short
break and refreshment.
16:00 - 16:30
$69.5
$69.5
$49.5
Energy Hunger Stress Sadness Budget
40% 80% 10% 0%
Human Intervention (Option 1):
Adjusting interoceptive states
Human Intervention (Option 2):
Providing verbal feedback
“Oh no, I totally forgot! There's an assignment due tonight
and I need to change my plans immediately to get it done!”
…
…
…
… 70%
Figure 11. Diego adapts original plan to suit user’s intervention.
Finally, using V-IRL’s street views and Map, Diego can
traverse regions of interest scouting for potential scenic
viewpoints for you to visit as shown in Fig. 9. He uses
VQA to rate and assess each captured view, and adds the
highest-rated locations to your itinerary.
4. System Fundamentals
This section introduces our system’s core: a platform designed for perception-driven agents that transforms realworld cities around the world into a vast virtual playground where agents can be constructed to solve practical tasks. At its heart, V-IRL is comprised of a hierarchical architecture (see Fig. 12). The platform lies at
the foundation—providing the underlying components and
infrastructure for agents to employ. Higher level capabilities of CV
Perception ,
LM
Reasoning ,
ENV
Action , and
COL
Collaboration emerge from the platform’s components.
Finally, agents leverage these capabilities and user-defined
metadata in task-specific routines to solve tasks.
4.1. Agent Definition
In our system, agent behavior is shaped by user-defined
metadata, including a background, an intended goal, and
an interoceptive state. The background provides the context
necessary to instantiate the agent in the real world (location), and to guide its reasoning and decision-making (biography). Intentions outline agents’ purpose within the environment. An agent’s interoceptive state reflects its internal
mental and physical status—varying over time and influencing its behavior. This novel concept is crucial to AI agents
for enhancing collaboration with humans (see Sec. 3.4.2).
Concretely, agents are developed by writing task-specific
run() routines that leverage the various components of
our platform and the agent’s metadata to solve tasks.
4.2. Platform Components
Next, we delve into the platform components, which provide the infrastructure to instantiate capabilities, execute
agent actions, and ground agents in the real world.
Perception Reasoning Action Collaboration
Background Intention
Computer Vision Language Model
Environment
Interoceptive State
Agent Capabilities Platform
Open-World
Recognition Localization
Street View
Imagery Geolocation Mapping Place Info &
Search Movement
Feature
Matching
Human / Agent
Interaction
Tool & API
Use
Biography Goal Task Mental Physical
VQA
Location
Figure 12. Hierarchical V-IRL architecture described in Sec. 4.
4.2.1 Environment (Action) ENV
Environment components are responsible for grounding agents in the world around them: providing a navigable
representation of real cities (see Sec. 3.1). Geographic coordinates serve as the link between the world and our virtual
representation of it. Leveraging the Google Maps Platform
(GMP) [27], V-IRL enables agents to access street view imagery, query valid movements, retrieve information about
nearby locations, and plan routes. As these coordinates and
location information are bound to the real world, they also
provide a natural interface with external tools that leverage
geolocation—such as real estate APIs (see Sec. 3.2). Technical designs of environment are detailed in Appendix C.
4.2.2 Vision (Perception) CV
Perception components enable agents to process the
sensory-rich data provided by the environment, especially
street view imagery. Pretrained localization models [40]
give agents a precise spatial understanding of their environment. This allows RX-399 to identify and count instances of
objects, and Hiro to pick out specific businesses to look up
with the GMP (Sec. 3.3). While localization models allow
for precise interaction with perceptive input, open-world
recognition models [57] are more general, and allow agents
to detect a wider range of objects in their field of view (e.g.,
Tourist searches for the Apple Store). Pretrained feature
matching models [44] provide an understanding of continuity across views of the same location, and enable agents
to identify & deduplicate instances of the same object from
different viewpoints (Sec. 3.3). Multimodal models with
VQA & Captioning capabilities [39] bridge the perceptual
world with natural language, and are essential for integration with reasoning (Sec. 3.3).
8
Working
Memory
Interactive
Concierge
Local Agents
Revising Loop
Hierarchical
Coordinator
Interoceptive
Estimator
Supervisor
Planning Iterations
Environment
Human
Background
Intention
Interoceptive State
Budget
Human-Agent
Interaction
Agent-Agent
Collaboration
Information
Retrieval
Audit Revise Approve
Figure 13. Architecture overview of interactive concierge agent Diego (Sec. 3.4.2). See pipeline description in Sec. 4.4.
4.2.3 Language (Reasoning & Collaboration) LM
Reasoning components allow decision making based on
information from perception and the environment. LLMs
such as GPT-4 [2] and Llama 2 [72] interface across various
APIs (Sec. 3.2), transforming environmental data and perceptual outputs into actionable insights. They also enable COL
Collaboration between agents or with humans through
natural language (Sec. 3.4) Custom prompts facilitate this
interaction (see Sec. 4.4).
4.3. V-IRL Capabilities
Our platform’s components can be flexibly combined to exhibit a vast array of capabilities. In Sec. 3, we present agents
that exhibit increasingly complex behaviors, each requiring
more components of the platform. From simple combinations, like the Route Optimizer (Sec. 3.1), to more complex arrangements, like the Tourist (Sec. 3.4.1), our system
showcases the versatility and potential of the V-IRL platform to be applied to various real-world scenarios. Next,
we perform a high-level case study of how V-IRL’s components are combined to create our most complex agent; in
Appendix D, we delve deeper into the low-level platform
details that underpin creating a V-IRL agent.
4.4. High-Level System Case Study: Interactive
Concierge “Diego”
By studying Diego (Sec. 3.4.2), we illustrate how our platform’s components are combined to create complex agents.
Behind Diego’s proficiency in developing itineraries is
his iterative planning pipeline (depicted in Fig. 13). The
process begins with Diego creating an initial draft plan
for the first activity using GPT-4, taking into account the
user’s biography, requirements, and previous activities in
working memory. This draft is then meticulously refined.
First, a hierarchical coordination module retrieves real transportation time and asks a recommendation agent for dining recommendations. Subsequently, an
interoceptive estimation module evaluates the
effect of the proposed activity on the user’s mental/physical state and budget.
The crucial final step involves a supervisor
module, which reviews (“audits”) the incoming activity in light of the current user status, remaining budget, and potential interactions (exemplified in
Fig. 11). If the supervisor deems the plan unsuitable, it initiates revisions. The revised plan is then
looped back to the hierarchical coordinator
and interoceptive estimator for reliability, followed by another review from the supervisor (see
the revising loop in Fig. 13). This iterative process between the hierarchical coordinator, the
interoceptive estimator, and the supervisor
continues until the supervisor approves the activity and
adds it to its working memory.
After finalizing an activity, Diego proceeds to plan the
subsequent activity by repeating this process until the day’s
itinerary is complete.
5. V-IRL Benchmarks
In the previous sections, we illustrate the primary benefit of
the V-IRL platform: seamless access to first-person streetview imagery and descriptive information about real-world
cities across the globe. This scalable source of truly openworld data can be harnessed to test core component models and agent capabilities. We propose three V-IRL benchmarks: two evaluating vision-language models on openworld vision tasks (Secs. 5.2 and 5.3), and one evaluating
end-to-end agent performance (Sec. 5.4). Benchmark details are in Appendix E.
5.1. Automated Data and Annotation Collection
To allow our V-IRL benchmarks to scale globally, we develop an automatic data/annotation construction pipeline
instead of crawling and manually annotating limited data.
This allows models to be conveniently tested worldwide,
provided there is access to Google Street Views [27].
Region Selection. Though our benchmark is feasible across
all regions covered by the GMP, we select 14 districts across
12 cities from 6 continents to ensure coverage of a diverse
9
data distribution while keeping inference costs affordable.
The detailed locations of these regions are listed in Tab. 2.
Place Types. We collect place information in each region for all 96 places types annotated by GMP†
. Our VIRL place: detection, recognition and VQA benchmarks are
built upon all or part of these place types.
Vision and Place Data Collection. Within each region,
we collect geolocations with available street views, place
information, and place-centric images.
Data Cleaning. Though scalable, automated data collection can introduce noise due to the absence of human supervision. To this end, we design three automatic data cleaning
strategies: i) distance-based filtering to exclude places not
easily visible from any street views due to their distance;
ii) human-review filtering to remove “zombie” places with
no reviews which might no longer be valid or relevant; and
iii) CLIP-based filtering to retain only place-centric images
with a high CLIP likelihood of being storefronts.
Human Verification. To validate the quality, we randomly
sample over 10% of data from each benchmark. We find
that only about 7% of the samples contain errors, which
confirms the high quality of our data, particularly given the
real-world sources.
Continent City District
Africa Johannesburg Rosebank
Lagos Surulere
Asia
Mumbai Khar
New Delhi Lajpat Nagar
Hong Kong Prince Edward
Tokyo Shinjuku
Australia Melbourne CBD
Melbourne SouthBank
Europe Milan Brera
London Oxford St
North America
New York City Chinatown, Manhattan
New York City SoHo, Manhattan
San Francisco Union Square
South America Buenos Aires Monserrat
Table 2. Region list for global V-IRL benchmarks.
5.2. V-IRL Place: Detection
Every day, humans traverse cities, moving between varied
places to fulfill a range of goals, like the Intentional Explorer agent (Sec. 3.3). We assess the performance of vision
models on the everyday human activity of localizing places
using street view imagery and associated place data.
Setups. We modify RX-399 (Sec. 3.3) to traverse polygonal
areas while localizing & identifying 20 types of places. We
subsample 28 polygonal areas from the 14 districts.
†https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/webservice/supported_types/#table1
Benchmarked Models. We evaluate three prominent openworld detection models: GroundingDINO [48], GLIP [40]
and Owl-ViT [52], OpenSeeD [89] and Owl-ViT v2 [53].
We also implement a straightforward baseline, CLIP (w/
GLIP proposal), which involves reclassifying the categories
of GLIP proposals with CLIP [57].
Evaluation. We evaluate the models based on localization recall, which is quantified as Ntp
Ntp+Nfn
, where Ntp and
Nfn represents the number of correctly localized places and
missed places, respectively.
Matching between Object Proposals and Places. As
mentioned in Sec. 5.1, we do not annotate bounding boxes
for places on each potential street view image. Such human
annotation diverges from our initial motivation of providing
plug-and-play and sensor-rich (V-IRL) benchmarks. To assign ground truth for each object proposal in this scenario,
we develop a simple matching strategy to assign object proposals from street view object detections to nearby places.
As illustrated in Fig. 14, we first project the bounding
box of each object proposal onto a frustum in the 3D space,
subject to a radius. We then determine if any nearby places
fall within this frustum and radius. If any nearby place is
found, the closest one is assigned as the ground truth for
the object proposal. Otherwise, the object proposal is regarded as a false positive. When multiple places are inside
the frustum, we consider the nearest one as the ground truth
since it would likely block the others in the image. This
process is also used in Intentional Explorer agent Hiro to
parse object proposals on image to place information.
Figure 14. Matching between 2D object proposal and street place.
Results. Tab. 3 shows that open-world detectors like
GroundingDINO [48], Owl-ViT [52] and GLIP [40] are biased towards certain place types such as school, cafe,
and convenience store, respectively. In contrast,
CLIP (w/ GLIP proposal) can identify a broader spectrum
of place types. This is mainly caused by the category bias in
object detection datasets with a limited vocabulary. Hence,
even if detectors like Owl-ViT are initialized with CLIP,
their vocabulary space narrows down due to fine-tuning.
These results suggest that cascading category-agnostic object proposals to zero-shot recognizers appears promising
for “real” open-world detection—especially for less com10
mon categories in object detection datasets.
Place Types AR10 AR20
GroundingDINO [48] 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 4.9 0.0 0.0 100.0 0.0 11.7 5.8
Owl-ViT [52] 0.0 61.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 2.4 0.3 0.0 0.0 0.0 7.1 7.1
GLIP [40] 20.0 0.0 100.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 18.4 0.0 0.0 0.0 15.4 9.0
OpenSeeD [89] 60.0 11.9 50.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 20.5 0.0 0.0 16.7 17.7 16.7
Owl-ViT v2 [53] 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 3.4
CLIP [57] (w/ GLIP proposal) 60.0 6.8 50.0 40.0 25.0 29.3 14.7 0.0 0.0 16.7 26.9 23.7
Table 3. Benchmark results on V-IRL Place Detection. AR10 and
AR20 denote average recall on subsampled 10 and all 20 place
categories, respectively. Full results in Appendix E.1.
5.3. V-IRL Place: Recognition and VQA
In contrast to the challenging V-IRL place detection task
using street view imagery alone, in real life, humans can
recognize businesses by taking a closer, place-centric look.
We assess existing vision models in this manner on two perception tasks based on place-centric images: i) recognizing
specific place types; ii) identifying human intentions via
Vision Question Answering (VQA).
Setups. For recognition, we assess 10 open-world recognition models on identifying a place’s type (from 96 options)
using place-centric images (see Tab. 4). For place VQA,
we evaluate 13 multi-modal large language models (MMLLM) to determine viable human intentions from a fouroption multiple-choice. The V-IRL Place VQA process is
illustrated in Fig. 15, where the candidate and true choices
are generated by GPT-4 [2] given the place types and place
names corresponding to the image.
Question: Which human intentions can be accomplished here?
Choices: A. Learning how to cook authentic Australian food.
B. Applying for a reduction on parking fines.
C. Reporting a crime or lost property.
D. Attending a yoga session.
Figure 15. Example of V-IRL Place VQA process.
Place-centric Images vs. Street View Images. In contrast
to the street view imagery utilized in the V-IRL Place detection benchmark, the V-IRL Place recognition and VQA
benchmarks use place-centric images. To illustrate the distinction between these image types, we present examples in
Fig. 16. The figure shows that street view images, sourced
from the Google Street View database‡
, are taken from the
‡https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/streetview/requestFigure 16. Top row: examples of street view imagery. Bottom
row: corresponding place-centric images.
street and encompass a broader view of the surroundings,
including multiple buildings and possible occluding objects/vehicles. In contrast, place-centric images, drawn from
the Google Place database§
, are taken on foot and focus
more closely on the specific place—providing a more concentrated view.
Evaluation. We adopt mean accuracy (mAcc) to evaluate
both place recognition and VQA tasks. For place VQA, we
follow MMBench [49] to conduct circular evaluation and
GPT-assisted answer parsing.
Model #Param mAcc (%)
V-IRL Place Recognition
CLIP [57] ViT-B/32 151M 18.2
CLIP [57] ViT-L/14 428M 37.2
CLIP [57] ViT-L/14@336px 428M 41.3
OpenCLIP [18] ViT-B/32 151M 21.2
OpenCLIP [18] ViT-L/14 428M 31.0
Eva-02-CLIP [70] ViT-B/16 150M 19.5
Eva-02-CLIP [70] ViT-L/14 428M 34.2
Eva-02-CLIP [70] ViT-L/14@336px 428M 40.7
SigLIP [88] ViT-B/16 203M 29.5
SigLIP [88] ViT-L/16@384px 652M 37.3
V-IRL Place VQA
MiniGPT-4 [91] Vicuna-13B-v0 14B 3.9
mPLUG-Owl [85] LLaMA-7B 7B 5.5
Shikra [16] Vicuna-7B 7B 10.9
BLIP-2 [39] FlanT5XXL 12B 69.6
InstructBLIP [19] FlanT5XXL 12B 68.0
LLaVA [46] Vicuna-13B-v1.3 13B 23.5
LLaVA-1.5 [45] Vicuna-7B-v1.5 7B 60.1
LLaVA-1.5 [45] Vicuna-13B-v1.5 13B 61.9
LLaVA-NeXT [47] Vicuna-7B-v1.5 7B 65.9
Mini-Gemini [41] Vicuna-7B-v1.5 7B 44.1
Intern-VL-1.5 [17] InternLM2-20B 26B 77.6
GPT-4V [2] UNK. UNK. 77.1
Qwen-VL-max [9] UNK. UNK. 74.3
Table 4. Benchmark results on V-IRL Place recognition and V-IRL
Place VQA. Green indicates increased resolution models, while
Blue denotes model parameter scaling.
streetview
§https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/webservice/photos
11
Johannesburg
Lagos
MumbaiHK New Delhi
Tokyo
Melbourne
London NYC Milan SF
Bs. Aires
0.38 0.4 0.42 0.44 0.46
Acc.
Visual Question Answering
20 40 60 80 100
% Eng. Speakers
English Speakers
Johannesburg
Lagos
MumbaiHK New Delhi
Tokyo
Melbourne
London NYC Milan SF
Bs. Aires
0.3 0.35 0.4
Acc.
Recognition
Johannesburg
Lagos
MumbaiHK New Delhi
Tokyo
Melbourne
London NYC Milan SF
Bs. Aires
0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1
Acc.
Localization
Figure 17. City-level visualization of V-IRL benchmark results.
Results. Tab. 4 shows that CLIP (L/14@336px) outperforms even the biggest version of Eva-02-CLIP and SigLIP
in the V-IRL recognition task, highlighting the high-quality
data used to train CLIP [57]. The bottom of the table
shows that LLaVA-NeXT (7B) outperforms its predecessors
LLaVA-1.5 and 1.0, but still has over 8% gap to InternVL1.5 with 26B parameters. Closed-source MLLMs GPT-4V
and Qwen-VL-Max yield outstanding performance compared to most open-sourced models. We note that even these
top-performing MLLMs (e.g. GPT-4V and Qwen-VL-Max)
still suffer from inconsistent issues during the circular evaluation (see Tab. 7). Moreover, vision models perform better
on place VQA over place-type recognition, suggesting direct prompts about human intention could be more effective
for intention-driven tasks. We provide more analysis in Appendix E.2.
5.4. V-IRL Vision-Language Navigation
As discussed in Sec. 3.3, Intentional Explorer and Tourist
agents require coordination between vision models and language models to accomplish vision-language tasks. To investigate the effect of various models on end-to-end agent
performance, we develop an embodied task that jointly tests
vision and language models: Vision-Language Navigation
(VLN). In VLN, agents navigate to a desired destination by
following textual directions using only raw street views.
Setup. We adopt the Tourist implementation from Sec. 3.4
and swap its recognition component with the various benchmarked models. These models are used to identify visual
landmarks during navigation. Subsequently, GPT-4 [2] predicts the next action according to the recognition results.
Navigation instructions are generated using the Local agent.
Recent work VELMA [65] attempts to enhance VLN by
leveraging LLMs on existing datasets [15, 64]. In contrast, our V-IRL VLN benchmark evaluates vision models
and their coordination with language models across a global
data scale. See more details in Appendix E.3.
Method Start Intersection Stop
Success Reac Arr Reac Arr Reac
Oracle (No Vision) 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
CLIP (B/32) [57] 0.22 1.0 0.86 0.84 0.83 0.22
CLIP (L/14@336px) [57] 0.44 0.83 0.73 0.94 0.67 0.44
EVA-02-CLIP (BigE/14-plus) [70] 0.39 0.89 0.77 0.94 0.72 0.39
EVA-02-CLIP (L/14@336px) [70] 0.22 1.0 0.82 0.83 0.78 0.22
LLaVA-1.5-13B [45] 0.11 0.61 0.55 1.0 0.56 0.11
PP-OCR [23] (+ GPT3.5) 0.28 0.89 0.73 0.94 0.72 0.28
Table 5. Results on V-IRL VLN-mini. We test various CLIP-based
models, MM LLM , and OCR model with GPT postprocessing.
Benchmarked methods. Four approaches are evaluated
to recognize landmarks during navigation: (i) Oracle that
searches nearby landmarks with GMP [27]; (ii) Zero-shot
recognizers CLIP [57] & EVA-CLIP [70]; (iii) Multi-modal
LLM LLaVA-1.5 [45]; (iv) An OCR model [23] to extract
text in street views followed by GPT answer parsing. Implementation details are provided in Appendix E.3.
Evaluation. We primarily measure navigation success rate
(Success), defining success as the navigator stopping within
25 meters of the destination. In addition, as navigation success is mainly influenced by the agent’s actions at key positions (i.e., start positions, intersections and stop positions),
we also evaluate the arrival ratio (Arr) and reaction accuracy (Reac) for each route. Arr denotes the percentage of
key positions reached, while Reac measures the accuracy
of the agent’s action predictions at these key positions. To
save GPT-4 resources, we mainly compare vision modules
on a 10% mini-set comprising 18 routes from 9 regions. See
Appendix E.3 for full-set results with CLIP and Oracle.
Results. Table 5 shows that, with oracle landmark information, powerful LLMs can impressively comprehend
navigation instructions and thus make accurate decisions.
However, when relying on vision models to fetch landmark information from street views, the success rate drops
dramatically—suggesting that the perception of vision
models is noisy and misguides LLMs’ decision-making.
Among these recognizers, larger variants of CLIP [57] and
EVA-02-CLIP [70] perform better, highlighting the benefits
of model scaling. LLaVA-1.5 [45] shows inferior performance with CLIP (L/14@336px) as its vision encoder, possibly due to the alignment tax [2] introduced during instruction tuning. Further, PP-OCR [23] (+ GPT-3.5) achieves a
28% success rate, signifying that OCR is crucial for visual
landmark recognition.
5.5. Geographic Diversity
Spanning 12 cities across the globe, our V-IRL benchmarks
provide an opportunity to analyze the inherent model biases across different regions. As depicted in Fig. 17, vision models demonstrate subpar performance on all three
benchmark tasks in Lagos, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Buenos
12
Aires. Vision models might struggle in Lagos due to its nontraditional street views relative to more developed cities (see
street views in Fig. 1). For cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong,
and Buenos Aires, an intriguing observation is their primary
use of non-English languages in street views, as shown in
Fig. 17 bottom right ¶
and Fig. 1. This suggests that existing vision models may face challenges when deployed in
non-English-dominant countries.
6. Discussion: Ethics & Privacy
Our platform serves as a tool for AI development and as a
crucible for ethical discourse and preparation. As AI is inevitably being integrated into society—e.g., via augmented
reality wearables, spatial computing platforms, or mobile
robots navigating city streets—it is imperative to confront
and discuss ethical and privacy concerns now. Unlike these
impending real-time systems, the data accessed by V-IRL is
“stale” and preprocessed—providing a controlled environment to study these concerns.
Notably, V-IRL exclusively utilizes preexisting, readily available APIs; it does not capture or make available
any previously inaccessible data. Our primary source of
street-view imagery, Google Maps [27], is subject to major
privacy-protection measures, including blurring faces and
license plates [25]. Moreover, V-IRL complies with the
Google Maps Platform license||, similarly to notable existing works that also leverage Google’s street views [1, 15].
We believe V-IRL is an invaluable tool for researching
bias. As discussed in Sec. 5.5, V-IRL’s global scale provides a lens to study linguistic, cultural, and other geographic biases inherent in models. By using V-IRL to study
such questions, we aim to preemptively tackle the ethical dilemmas that will arise with deploying real-time systems rather than being blindsided by them. We hope our
work helps spur proactive discussion of future challenges
throughout the community.
7. Conclusion
In this work, we introduce V-IRL, an open-source platform
designed to bridge the sensory gap between the digital and
physical worlds, enabling AI agents to interact with the real
world in a virtual yet realistic environment. Through V-IRL,
agents can develop rich sensory grounding and perception,
utilizing real geospatial data and street-view imagery. We
demonstrate the platform’s versatility by creating diverse
exemplar agents and developing benchmarks measuring the
performance of foundational language and vision models on
open-world visual data from across the globe.
This platform opens new avenues for advancing AI capabilities in perception, decision-making, and real-world data
¶Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Englishspeaking_population
||https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms
interaction. As spatial computing and robotic systems become increasingly prevalent, the demand for and possibilities of AI agents will only grow. From personal assistants to
practical applications like urban planning to life-changing
tools for the visually impaired, we hope V-IRL helps usher
in a new era of perceptually grounded agents.
13
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17
A. Appendix Outline
In these supplementary materials, we provide additional details for our V-IRL platform, including:
• Designs behind V-IRL Agents (Appendix B);
• Technical details and challenges in the V-IRL environment (Appendix C).
• A low-level case study of Intentional Explorer agent Hiro,
delving into implementation details of our system such as
LLM prompts (Appendix D);
• More detailed setups and results for our V-IRL benchmarks (Appendix E).
B. Technical Details of V-IRL Agents
In Sec. 3, our discussion mainly focuses on the innovative
capabilities and behaviors of V-IRL agents empowered by
our platform. We avoid in-depth discussions about technical
details in the main paper due to the concern of readability.
In this section, we go through our main technical designs
for each agent. More comprehensive technical implementations are available in our released code.
B.1. Peng: Route Optimizer
Peng is designed to showcase the utilization of real geographic coordinates within our platform. By processing
a sequence of real addresses, Peng calculates the shortest
path for traversing them using various modes of transportation, such as walking, driving, and bicycling, among others. This capability is powered by the mapping module
described in Appendix C.3. After that, Peng proceeds to
navigate through the destinations along the predetermined
path, employing the point navigation procedure outlined in
Appendix C.2.2.
B.2. Aria: Place Recommender
Aria leverages the realistic place information provided by
our Place Info & Search module (see Appendix C.4) to enhance LLMs’ reasoning capability in the geographic aspect.
Specifically, Aria evaluates Peng’s intention to determine
the suitable type of place and searches all possible places
in the vicinity. For each searched place, Aria considers its
reviews and user ratings from Google to summarize a place
overview. Subsequently, we customize prompts for Aria to
amalgamate Peng’s biography, intentions, and the summarized place overviews to rate each place between 0 and 10,
accompanied by justifications.
Without such technical designs, LLMs could recommend some places that are either too distant or permanently
closed. This issue arises because LLMs struggle to accurately understand geospatial relationships and often depend
on outdated databases.
B.3. Vivek: Estate Agent
The process employed by Vivek is similar to that of Aria,
as both are designed to recommend places. However, Vivek
showcases the versatility of our V-IRL platform by demonstrating how it can seamlessly integrate a wide range of realistic information beyond the Google Maps Platform, with
a standardized definition of geographic coordinates. This
capability enables the creation of even more sophisticated
and intriguing agents.
B.4. RX-399: Urban Assistance Robot
Different from previous example agents, RX-399 introduces visual perception capabilities such as open-world detection and feature matching. There are two fundamental
systems inside it – navigation and perception. In terms
of navigation, RX-399 can automatically navigate from the
current position to the pre-defined destination step by step.
This navigation process is elaborated in Appendix C.2.2,
and thus, will not be extensively discussed here.
When it comes to its perception system, RX-399 is designed to simulate human visual perception by capturing
street views within a 90-degree horizontal angle to both its
left and right. For each captured view, an open-world detection process is conducted. Leveraging the interactive capabilities of our environment, we further propose an active
detection strategy to dynamically adjust the agent’s egopose and focal length according to the scale and position
of potential objects. This significantly improves its performance as illustrated in Tab. 6. In the future, more advanced approaches such as visual search [76] could also
be considered. In the subsequent de-duplication procedure,
which aims to avoid double-counting objects across different viewpoints, we have tried a few strategies including
measuring with multi-view geometry, object tracking, and
feature matching. We choose feature matching because of
its accuracy and efficiency.
City Hong Kong New York City
w/ active detection 0.63 / 0.83 0.71 / 1.00
w/o active detection 0.10 / 0.33 0.30 / 0.60
Table 6. RX-399 detection performance with or without active
detection manner. Metrics are accuracy / recall.
B.5. Imani: Urban Planner
The visual perception system of Imani mirrors that of RX399. The primary distinction between them lies in their
navigation systems. Imani possesses the capability to plan
a navigation route in the given polygonal region, enabling
RX-399 to traverse that region. This functionality is named
“region navigation” and elaborated in Appendix C.2.2. Additionally, within the Imani agent, we develop a heatmap
visualization tool to visualize and verify the data collected
by RX-399 (see Fig. 3).
18
B.6. Hiro: Intentional Explorer
Hiro is a representative agent equipped with geographical,
perceptual, and reasoning abilities, to address a daily human
task: randomly exploring to find a suitable restaurant. In
this regard, we have dedicated a separate section to offer an
in-depth case study, including the detailed methodology and
prompts in Appendix D.
B.7. Ling: Tourist
Our vision language navigation pipeline of Ling is similar to [65], leveraging vision models, the map, and
LLMs. At each position, we start by capturing eight
street views around the agent, corresponding to front,
left front, left, left behind, behind, right
behind, right and right front. Vision models use
these street views to identify landmarks mentioned in route
descriptions, which are then verbalized as landmark observations. Also, intersection information is retrieved from the
mover to formulate an intersection observation. LLMs play
a crucial role in processing landmark & intersection observations along with the agent’s previous working history to
determine the next action. After each action, current observations and actions are stored into the agent’s working history. This auto-regressive process continues until the agent
decides to stop.
B.8. Local Agent
The primary mission of the Local agent is to generate
human-like and easily followable navigation instructions on
a global scale (refer to 3.4.1). This task is known as navigation instruction generation [64]. Contrary to most existing research, which depends on human-annotated data for
limited geographic areas, our “Local” agent automatically
selects suitable landmarks taking account into real-world
places and generates human-like route descriptions using
LLMs across the globe. Remarkably, it achieves this without the need for any training data, relying solely on our tailored prompts and a few in-context examples. The effectiveness of its generated instructions has been verified through
collaboration with ”Ling”. To the best of our knowledge,
this is a first in the field. There are massive technical details on selecting easily noticeable landmarks and prompt
engineering, which are available in our released code.
B.9. Diego: Interactive Concierge
In Sec. 4.4, we have already presented the technical designs
of Diego’s itinerary. Here, we detail how Diego can find
scenic locations as shown in Fig. 9. For any given destination, such as “Fort Tryon Park”, Diego will sample a
rectangle region around it and traverse all navigable positions within it. At each position, he will capture a photograph (i.e. street view imagery) using pre-defined headings,
pitches, and FOVs. Each photograph will then be evaluated
using GPT-4(V) [2], where it receives a rating between 0
and 10 along with explanatory reasons.
C. Technical Details of Environment
In Sec. 4.2.1, we provide an overview of our system’s environment, which grounds agents in real life. Here, we delve
into the technical designs beyond mere leveraging Google
Map Platform system calls. Concrete implementations can
be found in our open-sourced code.
C.1. Geolocation & Street View Imagery
At the core of V-IRL lies its innovative use of sensor-rich environment, including street view imagery and geolocations.
They enable agents to gather surrounding place and vision
information.
Geolocation. Agents in the V-IRL platform inhabit virtual
representations of real cities around the globe. At the core
of this representation are geographic coordinates (i.e. geolocation) corresponding to points on the Earth’s surface.
The initial geolocation of each agent is specified by its “Location” configuration, as illustrated in Fig. 12. Whenever
agents require access to surrounding information (e.g. street
views, places or maps), geolocation serves as a crucial parameter for querying the related Google Map APIs.
Street view imagery. Google Map Platform specifies each
street view imagery with multiple key parameters: geolocation, heading (the horizontal angle ranging from 0◦
to
360◦
), pitch (a vertical angle ranging from -90◦
to 90◦
), and
Field of View (FOV, ranging from 20 ∼ 120). It’s noteworthy that adjusting the FOV here is similar to changing the
camera’s focal length, rather than simply zooming in on an
image, which ensures that image resolution remains high,
even as the FOV decreases to a low value. By modifying
the heading, pitch, and FOV, we can simulate the human
sensory process of adjusting one’s pose and concentrating
on a specific area.
Alignment between street view imagery and geolocation.
Within our sensor-rich platform, a fundamental challenge is
to ensure agents are positioned at geolocations where street
view imagery is available. To address this issue, we design
a custom operation named “relocate”. Specifically, when
an agent is initialized at a location lacking street view imagery, the “relocate” operation will identify and transition
the agent to the nearest viable geolocation where street view
data is available. Notice that, this operation is indispensable
to our platform, as the positions with available street views
are relatively sparse in comparison to the vast continuous
space of all possible coordinates.
C.2. Movement
Enabling agents to move along city streets is a core functionality of our platform, allowing interaction between
19
agents and the real world. Whenever an agent needs to
move, this module powers all related processes, from route
planning and direction selection to the continuous update
of the agent’s geolocation during its moving. Since Google
Maps Platform does not provide APIs to access nearby navigable positions and directions, the design of this movement
module is a significant technical challenge and a substantial
contribution from our team. We discuss its low-level implementations in Appendix C.2.1 and the enabled high-level
actions in Appendix C.2.2.
C.2.1 Mover
Move by controlling the web interface. A straightforward
solution is to let the agent control the web front-end Google
Street View to select moving directions and move. Nevertheless, there are three key challenges for this solution:
(i) How can Python-implemented agents control the
movement via the interaction to the webpage? We use a
Python package Selenium** to locate web elements responsible for movement. After determining a movement direction, the agent uses Selenium to simulate a click action on
the web element corresponding to the chosen direction.
(ii) How can the agent acquire the necessary information to decide moving direction? Although agents can access all potential movement directions from web elements,
they cannot identify these directions without prior knowledge of what each represents. We find that the “transform”
attribute in the web element corresponding to each direction
can be leveraged to calculate their represented heading angles. The heading angle also allows us to collect street view
imagery for each movement direction. Agent’s movement
decision-making is then based on these heading angles and
the visual data from street view imagery.
(iii) How to track the agent’s geolocation along its
movement? To accomplish this, we customize a webpage
element to display the geolocation of the current street view
panorama. As the agents move and trigger updates to the
street view panorama, this customized element concurrently
refreshes to reflect the new geolocation. By using Selenium,
we can then extract this updated geolocation data, enabling
continuous tracking of the agent’s geolocation changes.
Move by grid-based relocating. In our test of the above
web-based mover, a critical limitation emerged: the webembedded Google Street View panoramas display only a
subset of navigable directions. This constraint significantly
restricts our agents’ mobility, often preventing them from
successfully navigating to their intended destinations due to
the incomplete coverage of potential routes.
To overcome this obstacle, we develop an alternative
method: a grid-based relocating mover. This approach
involves performing a grid search for geolocations in the
**https://www.selenium.dev/
vicinity of the agent and employing the “relocate” operation to sift through these locations, identifying those that
are navigable. While this method offers a more comprehensive view of navigable positions, it is markedly more timeconsuming than the web-based approach due to the extensive number of Google Maps API calls required.
In our practical applications, we design a heuristic strategy that combines web-based controlling and grid-based relocation. This hybrid approach aims to balance the tradeoffs between the speed and the completeness of navigable
position data, optimizing our agents’ capabilities and efficiency in real-world scenarios.
C.2.2 Navigator
Here, we introduce the high-level action of agents powered
by the mover – navigation. Unlike the mover, which concentrates on enabling agent mobility in the environment, the
focus here shifts to determining the direction of movement.
In our platform, we group different navigators according to
their usages into four types:
(i) Point navigator is designed to tackle navigation
tasks that clearly define single or multiple destinations
(represented in addresses or geolocations). This navigator employs the route planning function described in Appendix C.3 to obtain a series of key positions for navigation. At each location, the agent utilizes a greedy algorithm
to select the most optimal direction towards the next key
position that has not yet been reached. Exemplary agents,
such as “Peng”, “RX-399” and “Local”, use this type of
navigator in their implementation.
(ii) Region navigator is tailored for agents like “Imani”
and “Diego”, who need to traverse every position within a
polygonal region. This navigator first employs a grid search
combined with our “relocate” operation to identify all navigable positions within the specified region. Subsequently, it
adopts a heuristic algorithm designed to solve the traveling
salesman problem, planning an efficient order for visiting
these positions. The agents’ task is to simply follow this
predetermined route, visiting each navigable position in the
planned order.
(iii) Vision-language navigator is specifically developed for the tourist agent “Ling”, as well as for tasks within
the V-IRL vision-language navigation benchmark. Its primary function is to guide the agent in selecting a proper
direction based on navigation instructions. The detailed
pipeline is presented in Appendix B.7.
(iv) Intention navigator is utilized in intentional explorer agent ”Hiro“ to select the most suitable direction
that aligns with the agent’s specific intentions. The detailed
methodology and prompt are detailed in Appendix D.2.
20
C.3. Mapping
The mapping module in our environment is designed to
equip agents with functionalities such as route planning and
transportation time estimation. It mainly utilizes the “Directions API”†† from the Google Map Platform to facilitate
these capabilities. Given the complex nature of this API’s
interface, our principal focus has been on parsing its output and adapting it into various user-friendly interfaces for
agents.
C.4. Place Info & Search
Place Info & Search module hosts another important information source in our platform beyond the visual street
view imagery, enabling agents to interact with real-world
“places”. It provides various attributes of places, including
type, name, location, imagery, reviews, etc. In this module,
our technical efforts are primarily focused on understanding, comparing, and integrating the most suitable functions
from the vast array of Google Maps Platform APIs related
to place information and nearby place searches. Additionally, we devise some post-processing strategies to identify
and eliminate invalid or conflicting data sources from the
Google Maps Platform.
Another essential capability enabled by this module is to
associate object proposals in street view imagery and their
corresponding places in the real city. This function is vital
to enhance the reality of our platform by connecting street
view and geolocation. It also powers the “Hiro” agent and
the evaluation of the V-IRL Place detection benchmark. The
implementation is detailed in Sec. 5.2.
D. Low-Level System Case Study:
Intentional Explorer “Hiro”
This section delves deeper into the low-level implementation details of the Intentional Explorer agent “Hiro”
(Sec. 3.3), focusing on the prompts utilized to interact with
various parts of our system. Concretely, we present the
prompts in four subparts: identifying a type of place to
search using the user-defined intention (Appendix D.1), selecting appropriate roads (Appendix D.2), summarizing reviews of places (Appendix D.3), and making action decisions (Appendix D.4). These four components jointly enable Hiro to explore in our interactive embodied environment driven by his initial intention.
D.1. Intention to Place Type
Starting with a user-defined agent intention, Hiro first determines the type of place that could fulfill this intention using
GPT-4 and the following prompt:
††https : / / developers . google . com / maps /
documentation/directions
[Role]
You are PlaceSuggesterGPT, an expert
in recommending types of places
based on user-specified intentions.
[Task Description]
Given a user-specified intention,
determine the type of "place"
one should seek to fulfill the
intention. Your response should
be in the following JSON format:
{"place": "Desired Place Type"}
[Example]
Input: "Intention: <buy a book>"
Output: {"place": "bookstore"}
[Input]
Intention: <{agent_intention}>
[Output]
Your recommended place type based on
the user-specified intention, in the
required JSON format:
Using this prompt with the intention
Hiro is hungry and looking for a place where he
can try some good local food. He cannot handle
spicy food.
returns the result
{"place": "restaurant"}.
The identified place type (here, restaurant) is extracted
and set as the target category for Hiro’s open-world detector
during his exploration.
D.2. Road Selection
Whenever Hiro is at a crossroads, he determines the best
road to follow using his multi-modal LLM and GPT-4. The
primary goal of the road selection process is to identify the
road most likely to lead to the desired place type that aligns
with Hiro’s intention. First, Hiro fetches the street view
towards each potential road using the V-IRL environment.
Then he utilizes his multi-modal LLM (such as InstructBLIP [19] or LLaVA [46]) to generate captions for each
road using the following prompt:
I am looking for a {place_type}.
Please detail information that might
be helpful for me along this road:
Captions for each road are then formatted in the style of
{road_idx}: {road_description}
21
and concatenated to form all_road_descriptions.
These road captions, along with Hiro’s user-defined intention, are then fed into GPT-4 to determine the most promising road to follow using the following prompt:
[Role]
You are PathSelectorGPT, an expert
in choosing the optimal road from
multiple candidates based on a
user-specified intention.
[Task Description]
Given an intention, the road
previously traveled, and
descriptions of available candidate
roads, select the best road from the
crossroad. Your response must be in
the following JSON format:
{"idx": "Selected road index",
"reason": "Justification for your
selection"}
[Example]
For the intention "find a grocery
store", the road previously traveled
as "1", and with candidates "2:
Leads to residential area, 3: Leads
to a shopping district", the output
might be: {"idx": "3", "reason":
"Road 3 leads to a shopping district
which is more likely to have a
grocery store."}
[Input]
User Intention: <{agent_intention}>
Road Descriptions:
{all_road_descriptions}
Previously Traveled Road: Road
{from_road_idx}
[Output]
Your chosen road index and the
reasoning behind your selection,
in the required JSON format:
We design such a two-stage captioning and decisionmaking pipeline for road selection because Multi-modal
LLMs cannot process multiple images simultaneously.
However, with the recent advancements of GPT-4V, it may
be possible to perform road selection using several road images with a single prompt at once. Empirical findings suggest that GPT-4V yields more reasonable choices with the
following prompt:
[Role]
You are PathSelectorGPT, an expert
in choosing the optimal road from
multiple road images according to a
user-specified intention.
[Task Description]
Given a set of road images, select
the best road from the crossroad.
Your answer must be in the following
JSON format:
{"idx": "Selected road index (start
by 0)", "reason": "Justification
for your selection"}
[Input]
User Intention: <{agent_intention}>
[Output]
Please answer with the road index
and the reasoning behind your
selection, in the required JSON
format:
An example road selection response for the first crossroad
selection in Fig. 6 is as follows:
“idx”: “0”, “reason”: “Choosing road 0 promises a
genuine taste of local cuisine in a less commercialized setting. It’s likely to have family-run eateries where I can request non-spicy dishes and savor authentic flavors. This road
offers a tranquil dining atmosphere, allowing for a more engaged and leisurely culinary exploration among the locals.”
D.3. Summarize Place Reviews
When Hiro discovers a place in the street view imagery, he
retrieves its corresponding name and Google reviews from
the V-IRL environment. There is a complex algorithm behind projecting the 2D box on street view imagery to a concrete place in the real world, which is detailed in “matching between object proposal and places” of Sec. 5.2. After
Hiro obtains these place reviews, he summarizes them into
a place overview (to aid in decision-making) using the following prompt:
[Role]
You are SummarizeGPT, skilled at
condensing multiple reviews into a
concise overview of a location.
[Task Description]
Given multiple reviews with ratings,
craft a brief overview of the place.
Your response should be in the
following JSON format:
{"summarization": "Concise
description (limited to 80 words)"}
[Example]
For reviews "Great ambiance but
average food (Rating: 3)" and
"Loved the decor, food could be
22
better (Rating: 3.5)", the output
might be:
{"summarization": "The place
boasts great ambiance and decor,
but the food quality receives mixed
reviews."}
[Input]
Reviews: {all_reviews}
[Output]
Your concise overview (max 80 words)
based on the provided reviews, in
the prescribed JSON format:
D.4. Action Decision
After obtaining the overview of the identified place, Hiro
decides to visit the place or keep exploration using GPT-4
and the following prompt:
[Role]
You are ActionSelectorGPT,
proficient in choosing the most
appropriate action based on a
user’s background, intention, and
an overview of a place.
[Task Description]
Evaluate the provided user
background, intention, and place
overview to select the most suitable
action from the list. Your response
should be in the following JSON
format:
{"action": "Selected Action",
"reason": "Justification for your
choice"}
Possible actions:
- enter_place(): Enter the
designated place.
- continue(): Continue searching
for another appropriate place.
[Example]
For the background "loves historical
sites", intention "discover local
history", and place overview
"This is a 200-year-old preserved
mansion", the output might be:
"action": "enter_place()",
"reason": "The historical mansion
aligns with the user’s interest in
historical sites."
[Input]
User Background: <{background}>
User Intention: <{intention}>
Place Overview: <{place_intro}>
[Output]
Your chosen action and the rationale
behind your decision in the
prescribed JSON format:
Hiro’s exploration will continue if he decides to
continue() and will terminate if he opts for
enter_place().
E. V-IRL Benchmarks: Details
E.1. V-IRL Places: Detection (Details)
All category results. Due to the page limit of the main
paper, we only present the results of 10 categories in Tab. 3.
Here, we present the place recall for all 20 categories in
Fig. 18.
Recall
convenience store
cafe
clothing store
park
bank
pharmacy
lodging
book store
restaurant
jewelry store
library
laundry
school
bakery
hospital
supermarket
bar
gym
spa
movie theater
0 20 40 60
Grounding DINO Owl-ViT GLIP CLIP (w/ GLIP proposal)
Figure 18. Recalls in V-IRL Place detection
Example illustrations. To facilitate the understanding of
V-IRL Place detection benchmark, we present some examples of CLIP (w/ GLIP proposals) in Fig. 22.
Error Diagnosis of Detectors. We conduct error diagnosis for detectors in the V-IRL Place detection benchmark.
We examine two error types: localization error and classification error. As depicted in Fig. 19, the primary challenge
arises in classification, where detectors struggle to assign
correct labels, despite having accurate object proposals.
E.2. V-IRL Places: Recognition and VQA (Details)
Place types performance for recognition. In Figure 20,
we present the averaged accuracy for each place type across
10 benchmarked vision models. The size and the x-axis position of each bubble correspond to the number of places
within each type. A clear trend emerges: accuracy tends
23
GLIP GroundingDINO Owl-ViT CLIP (w/ GLIP) OpenSeeD Owl-ViTv2
0
10
20
30
40
50
Values
37.0
40.6
51.7 52.4 53.3
54.8
19.9
6.2
12.7
45.7
27.4
5.6
9.0
5.8
7.1
23.7
16.7
3.4
Avg Localization Acc (ALC)
Avg Recognition Acc (ARC)
Avg Recall (AR)
Figure 19. Error diagnosis in V-IRL Place Detection
accounting
art gallery
atm
bakery
bank
bar
beauty salon
bicycle store
book store
bus station
cafe
car dealer
car rental
car repair
car wash
church
clothing store
convenience store
doctor
drugstore
electronics store
embassy
florist
funeral home
furniture store
gas station
gym
hair care
hardware store
home goods store
hospital
insurance agency
jewelry store
laundry
lawyer
library
liquor store
local government office
locksmith
lodging
meal delivery
meal takeaway
movie theater
moving company
museum
night club
park
parking
pharmacy
police
post office
primary school
real estate agency
restaurant
school
secondary school
shoe store
shopping mall
spa
storage
store
supermarket
tourist attraction
transit station
travel agency
university
veterinary care
pet store
department store
physiotherapist
plumber
dentist courthouse
movie rental
painter electrician
hindu temple
Place count
Accuracy (100%)
0
25
50
75
100
1 10 100 1000
casino
bowling alley mosque
Figure 20. Category-wise accuracy and numbers for V-IRL Place
Recognition benchmark.
to correlate with the frequency. Common categories such
as clothing store, cafe exhibit higher accuracy,
whereas vision models often struggle with infrequent place
types like bowling alley or mosque.
Place types performance for VQA. The place types
performance of the V-IRL place VQA in Fig. 21 further
verifies the correlation between accuracy and frequency
from a human intention perspective. The top-10 categories
are closely aligned with the most common human activities, purchasing and dining. In contrast, the bottom-10
place types relate to places that are less frequently encountered and serve a more diverse purpose, such as mosque,
plumber and embassy.
Consistency Analysis of V-IRL Place VQA Results.
Here, we study the sensitivity of MLLM to the order of QA
options in VQA. As shown in Tab. 7, advanced MLLMs
still exhibit 4.5%-10.6% mAcc drop with circular evaluation. This highlights that MLLMs are still sensitive to the
order of QA options presented. bicycle store
bakery department store
supermarket shopping mall convenience store
florist clothing store
cafe
shoe store
lawyer
insurance agency government office
secondary school hindu temple mosque
courthouse
bowling alley embassy plumber
Place Type
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Accuracy (%)
Top 10 place types
Bottom 10 place types
Figure 21. Top-10 and bottom-10 place types averaged on four
vision models of V-IRL Place VQA.
Method InternVL-1.5 [17] GPT-4V [2] Qwen-VL-Max [9]
mAcc (w/ circular) 77.6 77.1 74.3
mAcc (w/o circular) 82.1 83.1 84.9
mAcc drop -4.5 -6.0 -10.6
Table 7. MLLM consistency analysis on V-IRL Place VQA benchmark.
E.3. V-IRL Vision-Language Navigation (Details)
Navigation pipeline. As mentioned in Appendix B.7, our
VLN pipeline is similar to [65], however, our benchmark
offers greater scalability through the worldwide V-IRL platform and an automated data collection pipeline, as opposed
to the manual annotation of a specific region. Furthermore,
our benchmark emphasizes the analysis of the vision component in the VLN pipeline, as opposed to [65], which aims
to enhance performance on existing VLN datasets using
LLMs.
Implementation Details. Here, we introduce the implementation details for LLaVA-1.5 [45] and PP-OCR [23] (+
GPT-3.5). For LLaVA-1.5 [45], we transform the landmark
recognition task to a multiple choice VQA problem, asking
Which of the following landmarks
can be identified with a high
degree of confidence?
The VQA options include all potential landmarks mentioned in the route description, along with a “None of
above” choice. The model’s response to this question is
then parsed as the landmark observation.
For PP-OCR [23] (+ GPT-3.5), we first extract all recognized text using PP-OCR [23] for each street view image.
Then, GPT-3.5 [63] determines the presence of each landmark in this street view image, jointly considering the OCR
text and landmark name.
Full set results. Apart from the mini-set results presented
in Sec. 5.4, we also provide the full set results of Oracle and
CLIP (L/14@336px) in Tab. 8. The Oracle results, interestingly, do not achieve a 100% success rate, due to incorrect
decisions made by the LLM at stop positions. This is evidenced by the high arrival ratio and low reaction accuracy
24
at stop positions. Empirically, we observe that the LLM occasionally decides to keep moving, despite clear destination
indications in the observations.
When we substitute the map in oracle with the CLIP
model to gather landmark observations from street view imagery, we observe a significant drop in the success rate,
due to the inevitable model prediction errors. To improve
the success rate in VLN, we can focus on two important
factors: (i) designing better vision models; (ii) developing LLMs and prompt techniques that are robust to visionrelated noise. Especially, our empirical findings suggest that
sophisticated prompt designs significantly improve the robustness of LLMs to visual observation noise.
Method Start Intersection Stop
Success Reac Arr Reac Arr Reac
Oracle (No Vision) 0.88 1.0 0.95 0.99 0.96 0.88
CLIP (L/14@336px) 0.22 0.84 0.66 0.90 0.61 0.22
Table 8. Results of V-IRL VLN-full.
25
Figure 22. Samples of V-IRL Place detection using CLIP (w/ GLIP proposals).
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