DialNav: Multi-turn Dialog Navigation with a Remote Guide

We introduce DialNav, a novel collaborative embodied dialog task, where a navigation agent (Navigator) and a remote guide (Guide) engage in multi-turn dialog to reach a goal location. Unlike prior work, DialNav aims for holistic evaluation and requires the Guide to infer the Navigator's location, making communication essential for task success. To support this task, we collect and release the Remote Assistance in Navigation (RAIN) dataset, human-human dialog paired with navigation trajectories in photorealistic environments. We design a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate both navigation and dialog, and conduct extensive experiments analyzing the impact of different Navigator and Guide models. We highlight key challenges and publicly release the dataset, code, and evaluation framework to foster future research in embodied dialog.

Web-Shepherd: Advancing PRMs for Reinforcing Web Agents

Web navigation is a unique domain that can automate many repetitive real-life tasks and is challenging as it requires long-horizon sequential decision making beyond typical multimodal large language model (MLLM) tasks. Yet, specialized reward models for web navigation that can be utilized during both training and test-time have been absent until now. Despite the importance of speed and cost-effectiveness, prior works have utilized MLLMs as reward models, which poses significant constraints for real-world deployment. To address this, in this work, we propose the first process reward model (PRM) called Web-Shepherd which could assess web navigation trajectories in a step-level. To achieve this, we first construct the WebPRM Collection, a large-scale dataset with 40K step-level preference pairs and annotated checklists spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels. Next, we also introduce the WebRewardBench, the first meta-evaluation benchmark for evaluating PRMs. In our experiments, we observe that our Web-Shepherd achieves about 30 points better accuracy compared to using GPT-4o on WebRewardBench. Furthermore, when testing on WebArena-lite by using GPT-4o-mini as the policy and Web-Shepherd as the verifier, we achieve 10.9 points better performance, in 10 less cost compared to using GPT-4o-mini as the verifier. Our model, dataset, and code are publicly available at LINK.