Can Vision-Language Models Think from the Sky? Unifying UAV Reasoning and Generation

Jintao Sun; Gangyi Ding; Donglin Di; Hu Zhang; Zhedong Zheng

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arXiv · 2604.05377

Can Vision-Language Models Think from the Sky? Unifying UAV Reasoning and Generation

Jintao Sun·Gangyi Ding·Donglin Di·Hu Zhang·Zhedong Zheng

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Abstract

Vision-Language Models have achieved strong progress in ground-view visual understanding, yet they remain brittle in high-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicle scenes, where objects are tiny and densely packed, textures are repetitive, and top-down orientations are ambiguous. We introduce UAVReason, a large-scale UAV-native dataset and evaluation suite for studying unified aerial reasoning and generation under this nadir-view domain shift. UAVReason aligns RGB imagery, depth maps, semantic segmentation masks, captions, and question-answer pairs within a consistent aerial domain. It contains 23.6K captioned frames, 273K VQA pairs including 68.2K two-frame temporal questions, and 188.8K cross-modal generation samples across RGB, depth, and segmentation modalities. We further adapt UAVReason-Bagel as a unified understanding-and-generation baseline that jointly optimizes language reasoning and dense visual generation objectives. Experiments show that general-purpose VLMs and off-the-shelf unified generators struggle with UAV-native grounding, while UAVReason-Bagel substantially improves over its pretrained counterpart, increasing VQA-1F F1 from 0.394 to 0.711, VQA-2F F1 from 0.427 to 0.822, and heading-aware VQA F1 from 0.798 to 0.973. For generation, it improves segmentation mIoU to 0.143 and reduces KID from 0.078 to 0.048 for depth-segmentation-text-conditioned RGB synthesis. More importantly, our ablations reveal a bidirectional synergy between synthesis and reasoning. Dense generation objectives improve temporal semantic consistency, while language-level reasoning regularizes sparse-condition image synthesis. These results suggest that unified reasoning and generation provide effective geometry-aware structural priors for physically grounded aerial intelligence. All data, code, and evaluation tools will be released.

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Jintao Sun, Gangyi Ding, Donglin Di, Hu Zhang, Zhedong Zheng. 2026-04-07. Can Vision-Language Models Think from the Sky? Unifying UAV Reasoning and Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05377

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