SpatialFly: Geometry-Guided Representation Alignment for UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation in Urban Environments

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21046v1
• Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:56:58 GMT
• Title: SpatialFly: Geometry-Guided Representation Alignment for UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation in Urban Environments
• Abstract summary: We propose a geometry-guided spatial representation framework for UAV VLN.<n>Running on RGB observations without explicit 3D reconstruction, SpatialFly introduces a geometry-guided 2D representation alignment mechanism.<n> Experimental results show that SpatialFly consistently outperforms state-of-the-art UAV VLN baselines across both seen and unseen environments.
• Score: 49.966170814478915
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: 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 representation alignment 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 aligns 2D semantic tokens with 3D geometric tokens through cross-modal attention, followed by gated residual fusion to preserve semantic discrimination. 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.

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