CitySeeker: Lost in Translation, Found in the City
Opening — Why this matters now Urban navigation looks deceptively solved. We have GPS, street-view imagery, and multimodal models that can describe a scene better than most humans. And yet, when vision-language models (VLMs) are asked to actually navigate a city — not just caption it — performance collapses in subtle, embarrassing ways. The gap is no longer about perception quality. It is about cognition: remembering where you have been, knowing when you are wrong, and understanding implicit human intent. This is the exact gap CitySeeker is designed to expose. ...