AirNav: A Large-Scale UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation Dataset with Natural and Diverse Instructions

Existing UAV vision-and-language navigation (VLN) benchmarks rarely provide realistic aerial scenes, natural process-level instructions, and sufficient scale simultaneously, making it difficult to systematically train and evaluate UAV VLN agents under realistic settings. To address this, we propose $\mathbf{\text{AirNav}}$, a large-scale benchmark built on real urban aerial data, comprising 137K navigation samples with natural and diverse instructions generated via a human–LLM collaborative pipeline with 10 user personas. We conduct a systematic evaluation of representative approaches on AirNav, ranging from traditional models to multimodal large language models (MLLMs), under unified metrics with open-source implementations. We further propose $\mathbf{\text{AirVLN-R1}}$, trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), achieving state-of-the-art performance with a 51.82% success rate on the test-unseen split. Real-world experiments on a physical UAV platform provide preliminary evidence of sim-to-real transferability, and our dataset and code are publicly available.