FreeFly-Thinking : Aligning Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Continuous UAV Navigation
On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Vision-Language Navigation aims to enable agents to understand natural language instructions and carry out appropriate navigation actions in real-world environments. Most work focuses on indoor settings, with little research in complex outdoor scenes. Current UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation models typically act as black boxes without explicit reasoning. We introduce FreeFly-thinking, an end-to-end VLN framework that converts the UAV agent's egocentric images and language instructions into a series of actions, inspired by environment of urban architecture proposed by OpenFly. We first construct a UAV dataset for navigation task, and then performing natural language chain of thought. We adopt a two-stage training strategy: Supervised fine-tuning and Reinforcement fine-tuning. Experiments on unseen test demonstrate a strong performance, presenting robustness and efficiency in UAV navigation issue.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 19 of its 21 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2026.
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- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
- 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
- 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
- 2019Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Researchcited by 1,163
- 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,013
- 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 429
- 2023RLHF-V: Towards Trustworthy MLLMs via Behavior Alignment from Fine-grained Correctional Human Feedbackcited by 404
- 2021A Survey of Embodied AI: From Simulators to Research Taskscited by 256
- 2025SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignmentcited by 149
- 2023AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVscited by 117
- 2025AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoningcited by 108
6 more
- 2024Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodologycited by 92
- 2025VLN-R1: Vision-Language Navigation via Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 61
- 2025Openfly: A comprehensive platform for aerial vision-language navigationcited by 43
- 2024CityNav: A Large-Scale Dataset for Real-World Aerial Navigationcited by 40
- 20221st Place Solutions for RxR-Habitat Vision-and-Language Navigation Competition (CVPR 2022)cited by 30
- 2026AutoFly: Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Autonomous Navigation in the Wildcited by 15
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
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- 2025UAV-VLN: End-to-End Vision Language guided Navigation for UAVs
- 2026Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs: Progress, Challenges, and a Research Roadmap
- 2025SoraNav: Adaptive UAV Task-Centric Navigation via Zeroshot VLM Reasoning
- 2026Vision-Language Navigation for Aerial Robots: Towards the Era of Large Language Models
- 2025Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with a Unified Framework for Spatial, Temporal and Embodied Reasoning
- 2025CityNavAgent: Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Semantic Planning and Global Memory
- 2026ActiveFly-Bench: Aligning Embodied Question Answering with Vision-Language-Action for Aerial Embodied Perception
- 2026WorldFly: A World-Model-Based Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Navigation