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arXiv · 2610.10421

AirGroundVLN: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Goal-Oriented Air-Ground Collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation

Zhenxuan Zeng·Qingle Wu·Wei Suo·Maojia Wu·Bairong Zhang·Hangzheng Yu·Peng Wang
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Abstract

Goal-oriented Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to locate and reach targets described in natural language without prescribed routes. Air--ground collaboration is valuable for tasks requiring both wide-area search and fine-grained localization. However, systematic study of goal-oriented air--ground collaborative VLN remains limited by the lack of large-scale, diverse benchmarks and two core challenges: 1) substantial differences between aerial and ground views, together with useful observations becoming unavailable as navigation proceeds, make it difficult to maintain spatially consistent context across platforms and over time; and 2) asymmetric spatial observability makes ground perception locally detailed but spatially limited and aerial perception broad but locally coarse, limiting the reliability of single-platform planning. To address these limitations, we introduce AirGroundVLN, a benchmark containing 10,281 navigation episodes and 955 target instances across 19 Unreal Engine environments, with seen/unseen splits and an aerial-visibility protocol for systematic evaluation. Alongside the benchmark, we propose AG-CoNAV, a trainable reference framework comprising two key components: Spatiotemporally Anchored Collaborative Memory (SACM) and Aerial-Guided Regional-to-Local Planning (AGRLP). SACM maintains and retrieves spatially consistent historical context across aerial and ground observations. Meanwhile, AGRLP combines regional aerial guidance with fine-grained ground navigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AG-CoNAV and establish AirGroundVLN as a comprehensive benchmark for future exploration.

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Zhenxuan Zeng, Qingle Wu, Wei Suo, Maojia Wu, Bairong Zhang, Hangzheng Yu, Peng Wang. 2026-10-07. AirGroundVLN: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Goal-Oriented Air-Ground Collaborative Vision-and-Language Navigation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10421

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