arXiv:2603. 04277v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous aerial robots operating in GPS-denied or communication-degraded environments frequently lose access to camera metadata and telemetry, leaving onboard perception systems unable to recover the absolute metric scale of the scene.
arXiv:2605. 20306v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce WildRoadBench, a wild aerial road-damage grounding benchmark that couples direct visual grounding by vision-language models with autonomous research-and-engineering by LLM-driven agents on a single professionally annotated UAV corpus.
arXiv:2607. 07737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: GNSS-denied unmanned aerial vehicles require occasional absolute position fixes to bound the drift of visual-inertial odometry.
Metric-Bench introduces a new benchmark for Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) that focuses on metric‑spatial reasoning in indoor scenes by using in‑image reference objects with known dimensions. The accompanying MetricReasoner fine‑tuning recipe employs structured prompts and numerical rewards to implicitly learn 2D‑to‑3D mapping without camera intrinsics. Experiments show that this approach improves spatial metric understanding by 43.1 % over existing models and boosts downstream embodied tasks, while also delivering gains on general VLM benchmarks.
arXiv:2607. 21400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to follow natural-language instructions.
arXiv:2608. 07557v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV-VLN) requires rapid and reactive control in complex 3D environments.
The paper introduces a tool‑augmented framework that enhances a small Vision‑Language Model (Qwen3.5‑4B) with geometric tools—3D object detection, metric depth estimation, and deterministic solvers for distance, size, and bearing—to improve metric spatial reasoning. By moving metric computation from the model’s weights into explicit solvers, the approach achieves significant gains on ReVSI‑Bench tasks, notably increasing absolute distance accuracy from 0.46 to 0.74 MRA and relative direction accuracy from 25.9% to 73.4%. The modular design allows swapping in different detectors, enabling a clear separation between perception and reasoning errors, and the model can autonomously sequence the tools to match a scripted pipeline on most tasks.
GNSS-denied unmanned aerial vehicles require occasional absolute position fixes to bound the drift of visual-inertial odometry. Cross-view image retrieval can provide such fixes, but raw appearance is sensitive to season, illumination, viewpoint, map age, and sensor modality.
AnchorVLN is an open‑vocabulary vision‑language navigation system that separates semantic proposals from geometric metrics. It uses a VLM to generate semantics while a geometry module supplies reliable metric quantities such as range and bearing, all within a Model Context Protocol server. The system achieves 64.4% on instruction following and improves object‑reference accuracy, reducing median center error from 3.37 m to 2.48 m.
The paper introduces AeroBelief, a dual‑layer semantic‑spatial belief mapping framework for aerial object goal navigation. It separates broad contextual plausibility (intuition layer) from target‑specific evidence (evidence layer) and fuses them into persistent spatial belief hotspots. The method also employs object‑conditioned visual reasoning and egocentric regional guidance, achieving state‑of‑the‑art success rates on the UAV‑ON benchmark.
As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-critical pipelines such as robotics, embodied AI, and safety monitoring, the opacity of their spatial judgments limits operator trust and auditability. MLLMs demonstrate strong reasoning but often struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and object hallucination.
arXiv:2608. 11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based UAV aerial image understanding and reasoning is essential for aerial intelligence yet poses distinct challenges arising from extreme scale variation, arbitrary camera orientations, and high object density.
SatNav is a new, scalable benchmark for long‑horizon vision‑language navigation (VLN) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), built from high‑resolution satellite imagery. It generates 118,000 navigation episodes across 59 scenes in 18 cities, using satellite crops to approximate UAV nadir views and featuring three task families—Boundary, Landmark, and Route—to test long‑term memory and geospatial reasoning. The benchmark also introduces SwiftVLN, a modular framework for memory component experimentation, and demonstrates that models trained on satellite data can transfer to real‑flight UAV observations.