DreamFly: Causal Memory and Receding-Horizon Diffusion Planning for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation
This work addresses key limitations in aerial vision-and-language navigation—namely, restricted historical context, short planning horizons, and unreliable termination decisions—by introducing a novel approach that integrates a causal memory mechanism, receding-horizon diffusion-based planning, and a lightweight stop-detection module (LiteStop). The method enhances current visual representations with causally aligned historical memory to prevent future information leakage, employs a diffusion policy to predict K-step action sequences while executing only the first step to enable long-horizon planning, and directly estimates stopping probability from action logits. Built upon the Dream-VLA architecture, the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OpenFly benchmark, attaining success rates of 32.04% and 29.46% in seen and unseen scenes, respectively, with corresponding SPL scores of 28.22% and 23.54%, and the lowest navigation error among existing methods.