LookasideVLN: Direction-Aware Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation
Yuwei Ning, Ganlong Zhao, Yipeng Qin, Si Liu, Yang Liu, Liang Lin, Guanbin Li
Abstract
Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (Aerial VLN) enables unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to follow natural language instructions and navigate complex urban environments.While recent advances have achieved progress through large-scale memory graphs and lookahead path planning, they remain limited by shallow instruction understanding and high computational cost. In particular, existing methods rely primarily on landmark descriptions, overlooking directional cues--a key source of spatial context in human navigation.In this work, we propose LookasideVLN, a new paradigm that exploits directional cues in natural language to achieve both more accurate spatial reasoning and greater computational efficiency. LookasideVLN comprises three core components: (1) an Egocentric Lookaside Graph (ELG) that dynamically encodes instruction-relevant landmarks and their directional relationships, (2) a Spatial Landmark Knowledge Base (SLKB) that provides lightweight memory retrieval from prior navigation experiences, and (3) a Lookaside MLLM Navigation Agent that aligns multimodal information from user instructions, visual observations, and landmark-direction information from ELG for path planning.Extensive experiments show that LookasideVLN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art CityNavAgent, even with a single-level lookahead, demonstrating that leveraging directional cues is a powerful yet efficient strategy for Aerial VLN.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{cvpr2026_lookasidevlndire,
title = {LookasideVLN: Direction-Aware Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation},
author = {Yuwei Ning and Ganlong Zhao and Yipeng Qin and Si Liu and Yang Liu and Liang Lin and Guanbin Li},
booktitle = {CVPR 2026},
year = {2026}
}