# No Training, Better Flights: Test-Time Scaled VLMs for UAV Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19288 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19288/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 30 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07895/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Pre-Training with Triple Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10401/) (2022)
- [AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06735/) (2023)
- [Towards Realistic UAV Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark, and Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07087/) (2024)
- [Towards Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09082/) (2024)
- [Beyond Model Adaptation at Test Time: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03687/) (2024)
- [Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12219/) (2022)
- [Autonomous Drone Racing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01755/) (2023)
- [FlightGPT: Towards Generalizable and Interpretable UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12835/) (2025)
- [Grounded Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs with Open-Vocabulary Goal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10756/) (2025)
- [A Safer Vision-based Autonomous Planning System for Quadrotor UAVs with Dynamic Obstacle Trajectory Prediction and Its Application with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12893/) (2023)
- [AeroDuo: Aerial Duo for UAV-based Vision and Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15232/) (2025)
- [Drone-NeRF: Efficient NeRF Based 3D Scene Reconstruction for Large-Scale Drone Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15733/) (2023)
- [Efficient Evaluation Methods for Neural Architecture Search: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05919/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Dynamic Neural Networks: from Computer Vision to Multi-modal Sensor Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07451/) (2025)
- [Deployment of Reliable Visual Inertial Odometry Approaches for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Real-world Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01867/) (2023)
- [Fusion of Visual-Inertial Odometry with LiDAR Relative Localization for Cooperative Guidance of a Micro-Scale Aerial Vehicle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17544/) (2023)
- [Drones Guiding Drones: Cooperative Navigation of a Less-Equipped Micro Aerial Vehicle in Cluttered Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09786/) (2023)
- [Cooperative Relative Localization in MAV Swarms with Ultra-wideband Ranging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18234/) (2024)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Point-to-Point UAV Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13943/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Test-time scaling offers a promising method to improve the inference performance of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) without additional training. Existing approaches to vision-language navigation (VLN) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) typically relies on a single inference pass, which can falter in complex environments by producing suboptimal or unsafe trajectories. In this paper, we explore a simple and effective approach to apply test-time scaling to VLN for UAV. We enhance navigation reasoning through an iterative refinement process that requires no extra model training, guiding the model to re-evaluate its initial navigation plan for better accuracy and safety. Our method first prompts the model to generate multiple parallel candidates and then performs a self-correction step, achieving deeper and more robust planning without changing the underlying model. To further strengthen decision-making, we design a multi-criteria scoring function to evaluate the refined candidates based on safety, goal alignment, and forward-progress. This simple yet powerful combination enables a frozen UAV navigation VLMs to self-correct and generate more accurate and reliable flight plans, achieving SOTA performance in this task.