# AeroGround: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Aerial-Ground Collaborative Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14721/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 34 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 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 34)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05065/) (2017)
- [A Corpus for Reasoning About Natural Language Grounded in Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00491/) (2018)
- [Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02276/) (2026)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [OPV2V: An Open Benchmark Dataset and Fusion Pipeline for Perception with Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07644/) (2021)
- [Visual Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00363/) (2022)
- [University-1652: A Multi-view Multi-source Benchmark for Drone-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12186/) (2020)
- [GQA: A New Dataset for Real-World Visual Reasoning and Compositional Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09506/) (2019)
- [V2X-Real: a Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16034/) (2024)
- [Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11766/) (2025)
- [Spatial-SSRL: Enhancing Spatial Understanding via Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27606/) (2025)
- [Cross-View Image Sequence Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14295/) (2022)
- [EO-1: An Open Unified Embodied Foundation Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21112/) (2025)
- [Griffin: Aerial-Ground Cooperative Detection and Tracking Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06983/) (2025)
- [SpatialThinker: Reinforcing Scene Graph-Grounded Spatial Reasoning via Dense Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07403/) (2025)
- [AGC-Drive: A Large-Scale Dataset for Real-World Aerial-Ground Collaboration in Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16371/) (2025)
- [Is your VLM Sky-Ready? A Comprehensive Spatial Intelligence Benchmark for UAV Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13269/) (2025)
- [MM-UAVBench: How Well Do Multimodal Large Language Models See, Think, and Plan in Low-Altitude UAV Scenarios?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23219/) (2025)
- [DVGBench: Implicit-to-Explicit Visual Grounding Benchmark in UAV Imagery with Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00998/) (2026)
- [UAVBench and UAVIT-1M: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs for Low-Altitude UAV Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14336/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely employed in understanding and reasoning tasks for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Existing UAV benchmarks primarily focus on aerial-view scenarios. However, whether current VLMs can perform well on understanding and reasoning tasks in aerial-ground collaborative scenarios which are practical in real-world applications like rescue and infrastructure inspection remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AeroGround, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs in aerial-ground collaborative reasoning. AeroGround is built upon a simulated aerial-ground dataset containing approximately 29,000 multimodal observation groups from diverse open environments, and provides 2,250 high-quality question-answering instances covering cross-view correspondence, spatial understanding, and reasoning. Experiments on 16 pretrained VLMs, together with two domain-adapted variants, reveal a substantial gap between current models and human performance: the best model achieves an average accuracy of 54.4%, whereas humans reach 93.3%. By systematically revealing the strengths and limitations of existing models in aerial-ground collaborative reasoning, AeroGround provides a foundation for developing more capable aerial-ground collaborative embodied intelligence systems.