Asking Less, Adapting Better: Feedback-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Abstract

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow instructions and navigate to target locations. However, current VLN agents often suffer severe performance degradation in unseen environments due to distribution shifts. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) offers a promising paradigm to bridge this gap, yet existing methods that rely on unsupervised entropy minimization can propagate errors through the trajectory, causing cascading failures in navigation. Recent methods mitigate this by incorporating human feedback, but they apply trajectory-level supervision uniformly across all steps without localizing the actions is truly informative, leading to inefficient feedback utilization and mismatched optimization granularity. To address these limitations, we propose FETA, a Feedback-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation method that improves both feedback efficiency and optimization reliability. To reduce unnecessary human interventions, we introduce a hierarchical sample selection strategy to localize informative samples. Specifically, we first filter trajectories whose normalized policy entropy exhibits large fluctuations. Within each selected trajectory, we further select the critical action via an entropy-gradient saliency criterion and query a single binary feedback on its correctness. A discrepancy-aware entropy optimization objective then updates the policy only at the queried step, with adaptive scaling that assigns larger relative weights to samples with greater prediction-feedback discrepancy. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FETA achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer human interventions, while remaining robust under noisy feedback and continual adaptation settings.