SpatialFly: Implicit 3D Prior-Guided Visual Reparameterization for Continuous UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation
About
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.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vision-Language Navigation | OpenUAV unseen easy 1.0 (test) | Navigation Error (NE)64.49 | 45 | |
| Vision-Language Navigation | OpenUAV unseen hard 1.0 (test) | Navigation Error (NE)108.6 | 45 | |
| Vision-Language Navigation | OpenUAV test unseen 1.0 (full) | Navigation Error87.82 | 37 | |
| Vision-and-Language Navigation | OpenUAV Easy (test seen) | Navigation Error (m)34.41 | 37 | |
| Vision-and-Language Navigation | OpenUAV Seen Hard (test) | Navigation Error (m)84.76 | 37 | |
| Vision-and-Language Navigation | OpenUAV Full (test seen) | Navigation Error (NE)58.05 | 23 | |
| Vision-Language Navigation | OpenUAV Seen (test) | Navigation Error (NE)58.05 | 14 | |
| Vision-and-Language Navigation | OpenUAV Easy Unseen Map UM (test) | Navigation Error (NE)72.9 | 9 | |
| Vision-and-Language Navigation | OpenUAV UM Hard (test) | Navigation Error (NE)146 | 9 | |
| Vision-and-Language Navigation | OpenUAV Full UM (test Unseen-Map) | NE104 | 9 |