Paper Detail

FineCog-Nav: Integrating Fine-grained Cognitive Modules for Zero-shot Multimodal UAV Navigation

Dian Shao, Zhengzheng Xu, Peiyang Wang, Like Liu, Yule Wang, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo

arxiv Score 25.3

Published 2026-04-17 · First seen 2026-04-20

General AI

Abstract

UAV vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate complex 3D environments from an egocentric perspective while following ambiguous multi-step instructions over long horizons. Existing zero-shot methods remain limited, as they often rely on large base models, generic prompts, and loosely coordinated modules. In this work, we propose FineCog-Nav, a top-down framework inspired by human cognition that organizes navigation into fine-grained modules for language processing, perception, attention, memory, imagination, reasoning, and decision-making. Each module is driven by a moderate-sized foundation model with role-specific prompts and structured input-output protocols, enabling effective collaboration and improved interpretability. To support fine-grained evaluation, we construct AerialVLN-Fine, a curated benchmark of 300 trajectories derived from AerialVLN, with sentence-level instruction-trajectory alignment and refined instructions containing explicit visual endpoints and landmark references. Experiments show that FineCog-Nav consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines in instruction adherence, long-horizon planning, and generalization to unseen environments. These results suggest the effectiveness of fine-grained cognitive modularization for zero-shot aerial navigation. Project page: https://smartdianlab.github.io/projects-FineCogNav.

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BibTeX

@article{shao2026finecog,
  title = {FineCog-Nav: Integrating Fine-grained Cognitive Modules for Zero-shot Multimodal UAV Navigation},
  author = {Dian Shao and Zhengzheng Xu and Peiyang Wang and Like Liu and Yule Wang and Jieqi Shi and Jing Huo},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {UAV vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate complex 3D environments from an egocentric perspective while following ambiguous multi-step instructions over long horizons. Existing zero-shot methods remain limited, as they often rely on large base models, generic prompts, and loosely coordinated modules. In this work, we propose FineCog-Nav, a top-down framework inspired by human cognition that organizes navigation into fine-grained modules for language processing, perception},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16298},
  keywords = {cs.CV, cs.RO},
  eprint = {2604.16298},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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