SP-Guide: Enhancing Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with Spatial Priors

Overview & Synopsis

Aerial vision-language navigation (AVLN) requires a UAV to reach a language-described target from partial egocentric observations while reasoning over large outdoor scenes. Existing approaches typically fuse view-centered RGB observations and globally anchored history maps as generic visual embeddings, leaving cross-modal spatial alignment to be learned from sparse navigation supervision. We present SP-Guide, a transformer- based goal-prediction framework that addresses this weakness of alignment through a Spatial Prior Cross-Modal Encoder, an Instruction Enhanced Decoder, and a Goal Convergence Filter for terminal target refinement. Experiments implemented on the CityNav benchmark show that SP-Guide improves success rate over the representative baselines, with the largest gains on unseen environments. These results indicate that physically grounded spatial priors provide an effective inductive bias for robust AVLN.