mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

HUGE-Bench: A Benchmark for High-Level UAV Vision-Language-Action Tasks

arXiv 2603.19822 ↗First posted 20 Mar 2026cs.CVcited by 3

On the map: Vision-language-action models → Aerial and drone VLA

Abstract (arXiv)

Existing UAV vision-language navigation (VLN) benchmarks have enabled language-guided flight, but they largely focus on long, step-wise route descriptions with goal-centric evaluation, making them less diagnostic for real operations where brief, high-level commands must be grounded into safe multi-stage behaviors. We present HUGE-Bench, a benchmark for High-Level UAV Vision-Language-Action (HL-VLA) tasks that tests whether an agent can interpret concise language and execute complex, process-oriented trajectories with safety awareness. HUGE-Bench comprises 4 real-world digital twin scenes, 8 high-level tasks, and 2.56M meters of trajectories, and is built on an aligned 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-Mesh representation that combines photorealistic rendering with collision-capable geometry for scalable generation and collision-aware evaluation. We introduce process-oriented and collision-aware metrics to assess process fidelity, terminal accuracy, and safety. Experiments on representative state-of-the-art VLA models reveal significant gaps in high-level semantic completion and safe execution, highlighting HUGE-Bench as a diagnostic testbed for high-level UAV autonomy.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Aerial and drone VLA, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models. Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2026.

Builds on

28 of 40 references.

References · 28

  1. 20233D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Renderingcited by 6,141
  2. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
  3. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
  4. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,653
  5. 2017Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environmentscited by 1,354
  6. 2019Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Researchcited by 1,163
  7. 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,013
  8. 2021Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AIcited by 579
  9. 2018On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agentscited by 526
  10. 2017AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehiclescited by 517
  11. 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 429
  12. 2020Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Groundingcited by 401
16 more
  1. 2019REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environmentscited by 330
  2. 2021History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 268
  3. 2019Vision-and-Dialog Navigationcited by 246
  4. 2020Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-trainingcited by 228
  5. 2024NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 222
  6. 2023Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robotscited by 220
  7. 2024NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigationcited by 201
  8. 2025MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulationcited by 183
  9. 2024Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Taskscited by 146
  10. 2019Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 129
  11. 2023AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVscited by 117
  12. 2022Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directionscited by 116
  13. 2019General Evaluation for Instruction Conditioned Navigation using Dynamic Time Warpingcited by 102
  14. 2024Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodologycited by 92
  15. 2024FastVLM: Efficient Vision Encoding for Vision Language Modelscited by 76
  16. 2025UAV-Flow Colosseo: A Real-World Benchmark for Flying-on-a-Word UAV Imitation Learningcited by 30

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Think Like a Pilot: Fine-Grained Long-Horizon UAV Navigation
  2. 2025IndoorUAV: Benchmarking Vision-Language UAV Navigation in Continuous Indoor Environments
  3. 2026Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs: Progress, Challenges, and a Research Roadmap
  4. 2026AirNav: A Large-Scale UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation Dataset with Natural and Diverse Instructions
  5. 2026SatNav: A Scalable Benchmark for Long-Horizon UAV Vision-Language Navigation from Satellite Imagery
  6. 2025VLA-AN: An Efficient and Onboard Vision-Language-Action Framework for Aerial Navigation in Complex Environments
  7. 2026OnFly: Onboard Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation toward Safety and Efficiency
  8. 2025OpenVLN: Open-world Aerial Vision-Language Navigation