Abstract:Modeling open-vocabulary language fields in 3D is essential for intuitive human-AI interaction and querying within physical environments. State-of-the-art approaches, such as LangSplat, leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting to efficiently construct these language fields, encoding features distilled from high-dimensional models like CLIP. However, this efficiency is currently offset by the requirement to train a scene-specific language autoencoder for feature compression, introducing a costly, per-scene optimization bottleneck that hinders deployment scalability. In this work, we introduce Gen-LangSplat, that eliminates this requirement by replacing the scene-wise autoencoder with a generalized autoencoder, pre-trained extensively on the large-scale ScanNet dataset. This architectural shift enables the use of a fixed, compact latent space for language features across any new scene without any scene-specific training. By removing this dependency, our entire language field construction process achieves a efficiency boost while delivering querying performance comparable to, or exceeding, the original LangSplat method. To validate our design choice, we perform a thorough ablation study empirically determining the optimal latent embedding dimension and quantifying representational fidelity using Mean Squared Error and cosine similarity between the original and reprojected 512-dimensional CLIP embeddings. Our results demonstrate that generalized embeddings can efficiently and accurately support open-vocabulary querying in novel 3D scenes, paving the way for scalable, real-time interactive 3D AI applications.
Abstract:A core challenge in AI-guided autonomy is enabling agents to navigate realistically and effectively in previously unseen environments based on natural language commands. We propose UAV-VLN, a novel end-to-end Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) framework for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that seamlessly integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual perception to facilitate human-interactive navigation. Our system interprets free-form natural language instructions, grounds them into visual observations, and plans feasible aerial trajectories in diverse environments. UAV-VLN leverages the common-sense reasoning capabilities of LLMs to parse high-level semantic goals, while a vision model detects and localizes semantically relevant objects in the environment. By fusing these modalities, the UAV can reason about spatial relationships, disambiguate references in human instructions, and plan context-aware behaviors with minimal task-specific supervision. To ensure robust and interpretable decision-making, the framework includes a cross-modal grounding mechanism that aligns linguistic intent with visual context. We evaluate UAV-VLN across diverse indoor and outdoor navigation scenarios, demonstrating its ability to generalize to novel instructions and environments with minimal task-specific training. Our results show significant improvements in instruction-following accuracy and trajectory efficiency, highlighting the potential of LLM-driven vision-language interfaces for safe, intuitive, and generalizable UAV autonomy.