mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs

arXiv 2308.06735 ↗First posted 13 Aug 2023cs.CV cs.AI cs.ROcited by 121

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Abstract (arXiv)

Recently emerged Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks have drawn significant attention in both computer vision and natural language processing communities. Existing VLN tasks are built for agents that navigate on the ground, either indoors or outdoors. However, many tasks require intelligent agents to carry out in the sky, such as UAV-based goods delivery, traffic/security patrol, and scenery tour, to name a few. Navigating in the sky is more complicated than on the ground because agents need to consider the flying height and more complex spatial relationship reasoning. To fill this gap and facilitate research in this field, we propose a new task named AerialVLN, which is UAV-based and towards outdoor environments. We develop a 3D simulator rendered by near-realistic pictures of 25 city-level scenarios. Our simulator supports continuous navigation, environment extension and configuration. We also proposed an extended baseline model based on the widely-used cross-modal-alignment (CMA) navigation methods. We find that there is still a significant gap between the baseline model and human performance, which suggests AerialVLN is a new challenging task. Dataset and code is available at https://github.com/AirVLN/AirVLN.

Key facts. Cited by 121 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2023.

Builds on

26 of 35 references.

References · 26

  1. 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,027
  2. 2019ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Taskscited by 783
  3. 2017AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehiclescited by 523
  4. 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 441
  5. 2020Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Groundingcited by 414
  6. 2019REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environmentscited by 333
  7. 2019Vision-and-Dialog Navigationcited by 250
  8. 2018Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environmentscited by 239
  9. 2020Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-trainingcited by 231
  10. 2021iGibson 2.0: Object-Centric Simulation for Robot Learning of Everyday Household Taskscited by 194
  11. 2022Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 193
  12. 2020iGibson 1.0: a Simulation Environment for Interactive Tasks in Large Realistic Scenescited by 155
14 more
  1. 2019Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 130
  2. 2021SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Explorationcited by 119
  3. 2019General Evaluation for Instruction Conditioned Navigation using Dynamic Time Warpingcited by 105
  4. 2018Mapping Instructions to Actions in 3D Environments with Visual Goal Predictioncited by 101
  5. 2021Language-Aligned Waypoint (LAW) Supervision for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 94
  6. 2019Interactive Gibson Benchmark (iGibson 0.5): A Benchmark for Interactive Navigation in Cluttered Environmentscited by 90
  7. 2020Sim-to-Real Transfer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 89
  8. 2019Tactical Rewind: Self-Correction via Backtracking in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 81
  9. 2020Object-and-Action Aware Model for Visual Language Navigationcited by 77
  10. 2021RobustNav: Towards Benchmarking Robustness in Embodied Navigationcited by 54
  11. 2022Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigationcited by 49
  12. 2019Learning to Map Natural Language Instructions to Physical Quadcopter Control using Simulated Flightcited by 43
  13. 2018Mapping Navigation Instructions to Continuous Control Actions with Position-Visitation Predictioncited by 35
  14. 2018Following High-level Navigation Instructions on a Simulated Quadcopter with Imitation Learningcited by 27

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 12; 2025: 44; 2026: 64.

121 papers.

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  1. 2024Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodologycited by 95
  2. 2024Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Modelscited by 79
  3. 2024Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 63
  4. 2025UAVs Meet LLMs: Overviews and Perspectives Toward Agentic Low-Altitude Mobilitycited by 49
  5. 2025Openfly: A comprehensive platform for aerial vision-language navigationcited by 46
  6. 2024CityNav: A Large-Scale Dataset for Real-World Aerial Navigationcited by 42
  7. 2024EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environmentcited by 42
  8. 2025UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spacescited by 36
  9. 2024Large Language Models for UAVs: Current State and Pathways to the Futurecited by 33
  10. 2025UAV-ON: A Benchmark for Open-World Object Goal Navigation with Aerial Agentscited by 33
  11. 2025CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Spacecited by 32
  12. 2025CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memorycited by 32
38 more
  1. 2025UAV-Flow Colosseo: A Real-World Benchmark for Flying-on-a-Word UAV Imitation Learningcited by 31
  2. 2025Vision-Language Models for Edge Networks: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 29
  3. 2025UAV-VLA: Vision-Language-Action System for Large Scale Aerial Mission Generationcited by 28
  4. 2025RaceVLA: VLA-based Racing Drone Navigation with Human-like Behaviourcited by 23
  5. 2025VLA-AN: An Efficient and Onboard Vision-Language-Action Framework for Aerial Navigation in Complex Environmentscited by 23
  6. 2025CognitiveDrone: A VLA Model and Evaluation Benchmark for Real-Time Cognitive Task Solving and Reasoning in UAVscited by 22
  7. 2025FlightGPT: Towards Generalizable and Interpretable UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation with Vision-Language Modelscited by 22
  8. 2024Exploring Spatial Representation to Enhance LLM Reasoning in Aerial Vision-Language Navigationcited by 20
  9. 2025RingMo-Agent: A Unified Remote Sensing Foundation Model for Multi-Platform and Multi-Modal Reasoningcited by 20
  10. 2025RefDrone: A Challenging Benchmark for Referring Expression Comprehension in Drone Scenescited by 19
  11. 2025Grounded Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs with Open-Vocabulary Goal Understandingcited by 19
  12. 2025VLNVerse: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Navigation with Versatile, Embodied, Realistic Simulation and Evaluationcited by 19
  13. 2024NavAgent: Multi-scale Urban Street View Fusion For UAV Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 18
  14. 2025See, Point, Fly: A Learning-Free VLM Framework for Universal Unmanned Aerial Navigationcited by 18
  15. 2025LongFly: Long-Horizon UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation with Spatiotemporal Context Integrationcited by 14
  16. 2026iWorld-Bench: A Benchmark for Interactive World Models with a Unified Action Generation Frameworkcited by 14
  17. 2024A Survey on Human-Centric LLMscited by 13
  18. 2025AeroDuo: Aerial Duo for UAV-based Vision and Language Navigationcited by 13
  19. 2025Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Grid-based View Selection and Map Constructioncited by 12
  20. 2025AirSim360: A Panoramic Simulation Platform within Drone Viewcited by 12
  21. 2025Aerial World Model for Long-horizon Visual Generation and Navigation in 3D Spacecited by 12
  22. 2023Vision-based Learning for Drones: A Surveycited by 11
  23. 2026AerialVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Navigation via Minimalist End-to-End Controlcited by 11
  24. 2024Navigating Beyond Instructions: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Obstructed Environmentscited by 10
  25. 2025RAVEN: Resilient Aerial Navigation via Open-Set Semantic Memory and Behavior Adaptationcited by 10
  26. 2025Next-Generation LLM for UAV: From Natural Language to Autonomous Flightcited by 10
  27. 2025Is your VLM Sky-Ready? A Comprehensive Spatial Intelligence Benchmark for UAV Navigationcited by 10
  28. 2025IndoorUAV: Benchmarking Vision-Language UAV Navigation in Continuous Indoor Environmentscited by 10
  29. 2024Why Only Text: Empowering Vision-and-Language Navigation with Multi-modal Promptscited by 9
  30. 2025General-Purpose Aerial Intelligent Agents Empowered by Large Language Modelscited by 9
  31. 2026NavDreamer: Video Models as Zero-Shot 3D Navigatorscited by 9
  32. 2024DaCapo: Accelerating Continuous Learning in Autonomous Systems for Video Analyticscited by 8
  33. 2025Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with a Unified Framework for Spatial, Temporal and Embodied Reasoningcited by 8
  34. 2025UAV-CodeAgents: Scalable UAV Mission Planning via Multi-Agent ReAct and Vision-Language Reasoningcited by 7
  35. 2025FlySearch: Exploring how vision-language models explorecited by 7
  36. 2026AirNav: A Large-Scale UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation Dataset with Natural and Diverse Instructionscited by 7
  37. 2025History-Enhanced Two-Stage Transformer for Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 6
  38. 2026APEX: A Decoupled Memory-based Explorer for Asynchronous Aerial Object Goal Navigationcited by 5

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