{"ID":6267213,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-10T01:11:38.759438437Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-13T01:02:08.706470581Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08504","arxiv_id":"2607.08504","title":"Early to Share, Late to Save: Synchronisation-Driven Communication Gating in Bandwidth-Constrained Cooperative VLN","abstract":"Most cooperative Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) methods assume unlimited communication, not considering real-world applications where bandwidth is restricted and information efficiency is critical. We introduce \\textbf{bandwidth-constrained cooperative VLN} and propose \\textbf{hindsight gating}: a lightweight supervised gate that labels communication-critical steps post-hoc from navigation failures, avoiding the high variance of REINFORCE. Contrary to the intuition that agents should communicate when uncertain, we observe a consistent counter-intuitive pattern: trained gates fire predominantly in early episode steps and more often when agents are confident, across all budget levels ($B \\in \\{1,3,5\\}$). We explain this through \\textbf{recurrent hidden-state alignment}: early communication injects grounded trajectory representations that persist and compound through subsequent Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) updates, achieving $+0.072$ cumulative alignment gain with $B{=}3$ transmissions, approaching unconstrained communication ($+0.078$) at 260\\% greater alignment efficiency than random gating ($+0.020$) and 320\\% greater efficiency than entropy-based gating ($+0.017$). Our results establish a new communication regime for bandwidth-limited embodied agents: synchronise representations early, navigate independently later. Our codebase is available at: https://github.com/AravG13/bandwidth-constrained-cooperative-vln","short_abstract":"Most cooperative Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) methods assume unlimited communication, not considering real-world applications where bandwidth is restricted and information efficiency is critical. We introduce \\textbf{bandwidth-constrained cooperative VLN} and propose \\textbf{hindsight gating}: a lightweight supervi...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08504","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.08504v1","authors":"[\"Arav Gupta\",\"Nivedan Yakolli\",\"Avinash Gautam\"]","published":"2026-07-09T14:00:17Z","proceeding":"cs.MA","tasks":"[\"cs.MA\",\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":614084,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-10T01:11:38.759438437Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-10T01:11:38.759438437Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":6267213,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08504","paper_title":"Early to Share, Late to Save: Synchronisation-Driven Communication Gating in Bandwidth-Constrained Cooperative VLN","repo_url":"https://github.com/AravG13/bandwidth-constrained-cooperative-vln","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}