UAV-Flow++: A Unified Suite for Benchmarking and Learning Language-Guided UAV Flight

원문 초록

Language-guided UAV navigation has largely focused on long-horizon route planning, leaving short-range, object-relative flight maneuvers underexplored. To address this gap, we formulate Flying-on-a-Word (Flow), a task requiring a UAV to convert concise natural-language instruction, egocentric visual observation, and current state dynamics into continuous flight actions. Flow encompasses both primitive motion commands and complex object-interactive behaviors, assessing motion intent comprehension and spatial context grounding. To enable policy learning and closed-loop evaluation, we introduce UAV-Flow, a comprehensive dataset comprising 30,692 expert-piloted real-world trajectories across eight distinct motion categories, alongside 10,109 simulation trajectories in the UAV-Flow-Sim environment equipped with task-specific completion criteria. Furthermore, we develop FlowVLA, which undergoes imitation pretraining on mixed real-sim demonstrations and online post-training via Tail-Aware GRPO (TGRPO). By leveraging group reward distributions, TGRPO effectively reinforces high-reward action sequences. Evaluated on 273 held-out UAV-Flow-Sim episodes, pretrained FlowVLA achieves a mean success rate of 75.58%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 6.72 percentage points, which TGRPO post-training further elevates to 93.16% with superior sample efficiency. Physical UAV experiments demonstrate robust execution of object-relative commands in both indoor and outdoor real-world scenes. Together, Flow establishes a novel benchmark and learning framework for language-conditioned flight maneuvers.