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arXiv · 2607.08359

FSD-VLN: Fast-Slow Dual-System Modeling for Aerial Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation

Xueke Zhu·Qingyan Meng·Liutao Yu·Wei Zhang·Zhengyu Ma·Huihui Zhou·Yonghong Tian
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Abstract

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables UAV autonomous navigation in unknown environments by mapping language instructions to real-time visual inputs. Compared with GPS-dependent or pre-programmed navigation, VLN supports intuitive human-machine interaction and stronger environmental adaptability, requiring tight integration of high-level semantic reasoning and low-latency flight control.Existing methods suffer from structural misalignment between global multimodal understanding and sequential action generation, causing jittery trajectories and severe decision latency for long-horizon aerial navigation. To solve this issue, we propose FSD-VLN, a fast-slow dual-system architecture disentangling semantic reasoning and low-latency flight command generation.The framework has two asynchronous branches: a slow stream extracting stable semantic priors from pre-trained vision-language models, and a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) fast stream modeling cross-temporal action distributions to produce consistent flight outputs. We further introduce a time-aware adaptive optimizer to stabilize long-sequence training and reduce gradient oscillation.Large-scale low-altitude simulation experiments show FSD-VLN achieves up to 2X higher navigation success rates on unseen scenes than SOTA methods, while cutting single-action inference delay and total task runtime by over 50%. Our work validates the benefit of decoupled semantic-control modeling and provides a practical paradigm for long-horizon aerial VLN.

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Xueke Zhu, Qingyan Meng, Liutao Yu, Wei Zhang, Zhengyu Ma, Huihui Zhou, Yonghong Tian. 2026-07-09. FSD-VLN: Fast-Slow Dual-System Modeling for Aerial Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08359

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