LookasideVLN: Direction-Aware Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation

Yuwei Ning, Ganlong Zhao, Yipeng Qin, Si Liu, Yang Liu, Liang Lin, Guanbin Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 32441-32450

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.