Audio-based UAV Localization with Adaptive Temporal Correspondence via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Audio-based localization provides a low-cost and illumination-independent sensing solution for anti-UAV early warning. However, existing methods typically rely on a predefined fixed audio segment length, which limits temporal correspondence and creates a trade-off between sufficient acoustic evidence and timely localization. To address this issue, we propose an audio-based localization framework with adaptive temporal correspondence. A probe segment is first used to extract a compact acoustic state that characterizes the reliability and consistency of the observation. Guided by the state, a reinforcement learning controller dynamically determines the required audio window size for each localization decision. The selected audio segment is then processed by a Mamba-based localization network with adaptive temporal feature modulation for 3D position estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive 3D localization accuracy with substantially reduced temporal correspondence latency compared to SOTA methods and exhibits strong generalization across scenarios.