mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SpatialFly: Implicit 3D Prior-Guided Visual Reparameterization for Continuous UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv 2603.21046 ↗First posted 22 Mar 2026cs.CV cs.AIcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

UAVs play an important role in applications such as autonomous exploration, disaster response, and infrastructure inspection. However, UAV VLN in complex 3D environments remains challenging. A key difficulty is the structural representation mismatch between 2D visual perception and the 3D trajectory decision space, which limits spatial reasoning. To this end, we propose SpatialFly, a geometry-guided spatial representation framework for UAV VLN. Operating on RGB observations without explicit 3D reconstruction, SpatialFly introduces a geometry-guided 2D adaptive representation mechanism. Specifically, the geometric prior injection module injects global structural cues into 2D semantic tokens to provide scene-level geometric guidance. The geometry-aware reparameterization module then uses geometry-conditioned cross-modal attention and gated residual fusion to adaptively reparameterize the visual tokens. Experimental results show that SpatialFly consistently outperforms state-of-the-art UAV VLN baselines across both seen and unseen environments, reducing NE by 4.03m and improving SR by 1.27% over the strongest baseline on the unseen Full split. Additional trajectory-level analysis shows that SpatialFly produces trajectories with better path alignment and smoother, more stable motion.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 35 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2026.

Builds on

35 of 48 references.

References · 35

  1. 2025VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformercited by 1,475
  2. 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,013
  3. 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilitiescited by 679
  4. 2021CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulationcited by 617
  5. 2024SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Modelscited by 297
  6. 2023Co-SLAM: Joint Coordinate and Sparse Parametric Encodings for Neural Real-Time SLAMcited by 183
  7. 2023NICER-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scene Encoding for RGB SLAMcited by 162
  8. 2025From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3Dcited by 127
  9. 2023AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVscited by 117
  10. 2024Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodologycited by 92
  11. 2025Embodied Navigation Foundation Modelcited by 65
  12. 2024Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 63
23 more
  1. 2025Evo-0: Vision-Language-Action Model with Implicit Spatial Understandingcited by 55
  2. 2022Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigationcited by 48
  3. 2025Openfly: A comprehensive platform for aerial vision-language navigationcited by 43
  4. 2025NavMorph: A Self-Evolving World Model for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 41
  5. 2025Multimodal Spatial Reasoning in the Large Model Era: A Survey and Benchmarkscited by 31
  6. 2023Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 25
  7. 2025FlightGPT: Towards Generalizable and Interpretable UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation with Vision-Language Modelscited by 22
  8. 2025VLA-AN: An Efficient and Onboard Vision-Language-Action Framework for Aerial Navigation in Complex Environmentscited by 22
  9. 2025GeoNav: Empowering MLLMs with dual-scale geospatial reasoning for language-goal aerial navigationcited by 16
  10. 2025Spatial Reasoning with Denoising Modelscited by 15
  11. 2026AutoFly: Vision-Language-Action Model for UAV Autonomous Navigation in the Wildcited by 15
  12. 2025AeroDuo: Aerial Duo for UAV-based Vision and Language Navigationcited by 13
  13. 2025OpenVLN: Open-world Aerial Vision-Language Navigationcited by 12
  14. 2025LongFly: Long-Horizon UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation with Spatiotemporal Context Integrationcited by 12
  15. 2025Nav-R2 Dual-Relation Reasoning for Generalizable Open-Vocabulary Object-Goal Navigationcited by 8
  16. 2025CitySeeker: How Do VLMS Explore Embodied Urban Navigation With Implicit Human Needs?cited by 8
  17. 2026SpatialNav: Leveraging Spatial Scene Graphs for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 8
  18. 2025Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with a Unified Framework for Spatial, Temporal and Embodied Reasoningcited by 7
  19. 2025Mobile Robot Navigation Using Hand-Drawn Maps: A Vision Language Model Approachcited by 5
  20. 2026APEX: A Decoupled Memory-based Explorer for Asynchronous Aerial Object Goal Navigationcited by 5
  21. 2025VPN: Visual Prompt Navigationcited by 4
  22. 2024Object-Oriented Semantic Mapping for Reliable UAVs Navigationcited by 1
  23. 2026FlyAware: Inertia-Aware Aerial Manipulation via Vision-Based Estimation and Post-Grasp Adaptationcited by 1

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2025SoraNav: Adaptive UAV Task-Centric Navigation via Zeroshot VLM Reasoning
  2. 2026AirForesight: Current-to-Future Spatial Map Imagination with Cross-Space Planning Consistency for UAV-VLN ↗
  3. 2025Is your VLM Sky-Ready? A Comprehensive Spatial Intelligence Benchmark for UAV Navigation
  4. 2026Dual-Layer Semantic-Spatial Belief Mapping for Aerial Object Goal Navigation
  5. 2026OnFly: Onboard Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation toward Safety and Efficiency
  6. 2026SpatialUAV: Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence for Low-Altitude UAV Perception, Collaboration, and Motion
  7. 2025Aerial World Model for Long-horizon Visual Generation and Navigation in 3D Space
  8. 2026Fly0: Persistent Metric Anchoring for Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation