GeoScaffold: Learning Compact Geometric Latents via Reconstruction for Efficient Vision-Language Navigation

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Recent vision-and-language navigation (VLN) systems increasingly adopt streaming Video-LLM policies that map egocentric RGB observations and instructions directly to low-level actions. Yet these policies inherit weak 3D geometric priors from 2D pretraining. Existing geometry-aware extensions charge a persistent inference-time price: depth sensors, 3D encoders, or per-step perception tool calls. We propose GeoScaffold, a geometric supervision framework that pays this price once, at training time, by internalizing geometry into the policy itself. It first learns a compact depth tokenizer on depth maps from the training trajectories and freezes it. It then fine-tunes the policy with a handful of learnable geometry query tokens, training their hidden states to reconstruct navigation-critical geometry such as depth, connectivity, and traversability. This supervision turns the query states into compact geometric latents for action decoding, and through the shared weights also internalizes geometry into the backbone's own representations. Like a scaffold, the tokenizer, target generators, and reconstruction heads are discarded after training, leaving the backbone and action interface unchanged. Extensive experiments show that GeoScaffold consistently outperforms leading vision-only navigators on continuous VLN benchmarks, offering a practical paradigm for lightweight edge deployment of spatially aware embodied navigation models.