# AirVista-II: An Agentic System for Embodied UAVs Toward Dynamic Scene Semantic Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09583/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 15 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [An Image Grid Can Be Worth a Video: Zero-shot Video Question Answering Using a VLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18406/) (2024)
- [Too Many Frames, Not All Useful: Efficient Strategies for Long-Form Video QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09396/) (2024)
- [UAVs Meet LLMs: Overviews and Perspectives Toward Agentic Low-Altitude Mobility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02341/) (2025)
- [CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12532/) (2025)
- [SynDrone -- Multi-modal UAV Dataset for Urban Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10491/) (2023)
- [AeroVerse: UAV-Agent Benchmark Suite for Simulating, Pre-training, Finetuning, and Evaluating Aerospace Embodied World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15511/) (2024)
- [ERA: A Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Event Recognition in Aerial Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11394/) (2020)
- [Semi-Parametric Video-Grounded Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11507/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [UAVs Meet Agentic AI: A Multidomain Survey of Autonomous Aerial Intelligence and Agentic UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08045/) (2025)
- [APEX: A Decoupled Memory-based Explorer for Asynchronous Aerial Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00551/) (2026)
- [ESARBench: A Benchmark for Agentic UAV Embodied Search and Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01371/) (2026)
- [CoordField: Coordination Field for Agentic UAV Task Allocation In Low-altitude Urban Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00091/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly important in dynamic environments such as logistics transportation and disaster response. However, current tasks often rely on human operators to monitor aerial videos and make operational decisions. This mode of human-machine collaboration suffers from significant limitations in efficiency and adaptability. In this paper, we present AirVista-II -- an end-to-end agentic system for embodied UAVs, designed to enable general-purpose semantic understanding and reasoning in dynamic scenes. The system integrates agent-based task identification and scheduling, multimodal perception mechanisms, and differentiated keyframe extraction strategies tailored for various temporal scenarios, enabling the efficient capture of critical scene information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves high-quality semantic understanding across diverse UAV-based dynamic scenarios under a zero-shot setting.