Existing methods for vision-language task planning excel in short-horizon tasks but often fall short in complex, long-horizon planning within dynamic environments. These challenges primarily arise from the difficulty of effectively training models to produce high-quality reasoning processes for long-horizon tasks. To address this, we propose Structured Preference Optimization (SPO), which aims to enhance reasoning and action selection in long-horizon task planning through structured preference evaluation and optimized training strategies. Specifically, SPO introduces: 1) Preference-Based Scoring and Optimization, which systematically evaluates reasoning chains based on task relevance, visual grounding, and historical consistency; and 2) Curriculum-Guided Training, where the model progressively adapts from simple to complex tasks, improving its generalization ability in long-horizon scenarios and enhancing reasoning robustness. To advance research in vision-language long-horizon task planning, we introduce ExtendaBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering 1,509 tasks across VirtualHome and Habitat 2.0, categorized into ultra-short, short, medium, and long tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that SPO significantly improves reasoning quality and final decision accuracy, outperforming prior methods on long-horizon tasks and underscoring the effectiveness of preference-driven optimization in vision-language task planning. Specifically, SPO achieves a +5.98% GCR and +4.68% SR improvement in VirtualHome and a +3.30% GCR and +2.11% SR improvement in Habitat over the best-performing baselines.

Reconstruction of static visual stimuli from non-invasion brain activity fMRI achieves great success, owning to advanced deep learning models such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion. However, the research on fMRI-to-video reconstruction remains limited since decoding the spatiotemporal perception of continuous visual experiences is formidably challenging. We contend that the key to addressing these challenges lies in accurately decoding both high-level semantics and low-level perception flows, as perceived by the brain in response to video stimuli. To the end, we propose NeuroClips, an innovative framework to decode high-fidelity and smooth video from fMRI. NeuroClips utilizes a semantics reconstructor to reconstruct video keyframes, guiding semantic accuracy and consistency, and employs a perception reconstructor to capture low-level perceptual details, ensuring video smoothness. During inference, it adopts a pre-trained T2V diffusion model injected with both keyframes and low-level perception flows for video reconstruction. Evaluated on a publicly available fMRI-video dataset, NeuroClips achieves smooth high-fidelity video reconstruction of up to 6s at 8FPS, gaining significant improvements over state-of-the-art models in various metrics, e.g., a 128% improvement in SSIM and an 81% improvement in spatiotemporal metrics.

We address the task of Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) under the zero-shot setting. Zero-shot VLN-CE is particularly challenging due to the absence of expert demonstrations for training and minimal environment structural prior to guide navigation. To confront these challenges, we propose a Constraint-Aware Navigator (CA-Nav), which reframes zero-shot VLN-CE as a sequential, constraint-aware sub-instruction completion process. CA-Nav continuously translates sub-instructions into navigation plans using two core modules: the Constraint-Aware Sub-instruction Manager (CSM) and the Constraint-Aware Value Mapper (CVM). CSM defines the completion criteria for decomposed sub-instructions as constraints and tracks navigation progress by switching sub-instructions in a constraint-aware manner. CVM, guided by CSM's constraints, generates a value map on the fly and refines it using superpixel clustering to improve navigation stability. CA-Nav achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two VLN-CE benchmarks, surpassing the previous best method by 12 percent and 13 percent in Success Rate on the validation unseen splits of R2R-CE and RxR-CE, respectively. Moreover, CA-Nav demonstrates its effectiveness in real-world robot deployments across various indoor scenes and instructions.

Realizing scaling laws in embodied AI has become a focus. However, previous work has been scattered across diverse simulation platforms, with assets and models lacking unified interfaces, which has led to inefficiencies in research. To address this, we introduce InfiniteWorld, a unified and scalable simulator for general vision-language robot interaction built on Nvidia Isaac Sim. InfiniteWorld encompasses a comprehensive set of physics asset construction methods and generalized free robot interaction benchmarks. Specifically, we first built a unified and scalable simulation framework for embodied learning that integrates a series of improvements in generation-driven 3D asset construction, Real2Sim, automated annotation framework, and unified 3D asset processing. This framework provides a unified and scalable platform for robot interaction and learning. In addition, to simulate realistic robot interaction, we build four new general benchmarks, including scene graph collaborative exploration and open-world social mobile manipulation. The former is often overlooked as an important task for robots to explore the environment and build scene knowledge, while the latter simulates robot interaction tasks with different levels of knowledge agents based on the former. They can more comprehensively evaluate the embodied agent's capabilities in environmental understanding, task planning and execution, and intelligent interaction. We hope that this work can provide the community with a systematic asset interface, alleviate the dilemma of the lack of high-quality assets, and provide a more comprehensive evaluation of robot interactions.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) stands as a key research problem of Embodied AI, aiming at enabling agents to navigate in unseen environments following linguistic instructions. In this field, generalization is a long-standing challenge, either to out-of-distribution scenes or from Sim to Real. In this paper, we propose NaVid, a video-based large vision language model (VLM), to mitigate such a generalization gap. NaVid makes the first endeavor to showcase the capability of VLMs to achieve state-of-the-art level navigation performance without any maps, odometers, or depth inputs. Following human instruction, NaVid only requires an on-the-fly video stream from a monocular RGB camera equipped on the robot to output the next-step action. Our formulation mimics how humans navigate and naturally gets rid of the problems introduced by odometer noises, and the Sim2Real gaps from map or depth inputs. Moreover, our video-based approach can effectively encode the historical observations of robots as spatio-temporal contexts for decision making and instruction following. We train NaVid with 510k navigation samples collected from continuous environments, including action-planning and instruction-reasoning samples, along with 763k large-scale web data. Extensive experiments show that NaVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in simulation environments and the real world, demonstrating superior cross-dataset and Sim2Real transfer. We thus believe our proposed VLM approach plans the next step for not only the navigation agents but also this research field.

Local feature matching enjoys wide-ranging applications in the realm of computer vision, encompassing domains such as image retrieval, 3D reconstruction, and object recognition. However, challenges persist in improving the accuracy and robustness of matching due to factors like viewpoint and lighting variations. In recent years, the introduction of deep learning models has sparked widespread exploration into local feature matching techniques. The objective of this endeavor is to furnish a comprehensive overview of local feature matching methods. These methods are categorized into two key segments based on the presence of detectors. The Detector-based category encompasses models inclusive of Detect-then-Describe, Joint Detection and Description, Describe-then-Detect, as well as Graph Based techniques. In contrast, the Detector-free category comprises CNN Based, Transformer Based, and Patch Based methods. Our study extends beyond methodological analysis, incorporating evaluations of prevalent datasets and metrics to facilitate a quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art techniques. The paper also explores the practical application of local feature matching in diverse domains such as Structure from Motion, Remote Sensing Image Registration, and Medical Image Registration, underscoring its versatility and significance across various fields. Ultimately, we endeavor to outline the current challenges faced in this domain and furnish future research directions, thereby serving as a reference for researchers involved in local feature matching and its interconnected domains.

Recently, CLIP has found practical utility in the domain of pixel-level zero-shot segmentation tasks. The present landscape features two-stage methodologies beset by issues such as intricate pipelines and elevated computational costs. While current one-stage approaches alleviate these concerns and incorporate Visual Prompt Training (VPT) to uphold CLIP's generalization capacity, they still fall short in fully harnessing CLIP's potential for pixel-level unseen class demarcation and precise pixel predictions. To further stimulate CLIP's zero-shot dense prediction capability, we propose SPT-SEG, a one-stage approach that improves CLIP's adaptability from image to pixel. Specifically, we initially introduce Spectral Prompt Tuning (SPT), incorporating spectral prompts into the CLIP visual encoder's shallow layers to capture structural intricacies of images, thereby enhancing comprehension of unseen classes. Subsequently, we introduce the Spectral Guided Decoder (SGD), utilizing both high and low-frequency information to steer the network's spatial focus towards more prominent classification features, enabling precise pixel-level prediction outcomes. Through extensive experiments on two public datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches, performing well across all classes and particularly excelling in handling unseen classes. Code is available at:https://github.com/clearxu/SPT.

In recent years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has attracted increasing attention due to their potential in a variety of practical applications. The application of LLMs with Embodied Intelligence has emerged as a significant area of focus. Among the myriad applications of LLMs, navigation tasks are particularly noteworthy because they demand a deep understanding of the environment and quick, accurate decision-making. LLMs can augment embodied intelligence systems with sophisticated environmental perception and decision-making support, leveraging their robust language and image-processing capabilities. This article offers an exhaustive summary of the symbiosis between LLMs and embodied intelligence with a focus on navigation. It reviews state-of-the-art models, research methodologies, and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of existing embodied navigation models and datasets. Finally, the article elucidates the role of LLMs in embodied intelligence, based on current research, and forecasts future directions in the field. A comprehensive list of studies in this survey is available at https://github.com/Rongtao-Xu/Awesome-LLM-EN

Local feature detection and description play an important role in many computer vision tasks, which are designed to detect and describe keypoints in "any scene" and "any downstream task". Data-driven local feature learning methods need to rely on pixel-level correspondence for training, which is challenging to acquire at scale, thus hindering further improvements in performance. In this paper, we propose SAMFeat to introduce SAM (segment anything model), a fundamental model trained on 11 million images, as a teacher to guide local feature learning and thus inspire higher performance on limited datasets. To do so, first, we construct an auxiliary task of Pixel Semantic Relational Distillation (PSRD), which distillates feature relations with category-agnostic semantic information learned by the SAM encoder into a local feature learning network, to improve local feature description using semantic discrimination. Second, we develop a technique called Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning Based on Semantic Grouping (WSC), which utilizes semantic groupings derived from SAM as weakly supervised signals, to optimize the metric space of local descriptors. Third, we design an Edge Attention Guidance (EAG) to further improve the accuracy of local feature detection and description by prompting the network to pay more attention to the edge region guided by SAM.

Incremental Named Entity Recognition (INER) involves the sequential learning of new entity types without accessing the training data of previously learned types. However, INER faces the challenge of catastrophic forgetting specific for incremental learning, further aggravated by background shift (i.e., old and future entity types are labeled as the non-entity type in the current task). To address these challenges, we propose a method called task Relation Distillation and Prototypical pseudo label (RDP) for INER. Specifically, to tackle catastrophic forgetting, we introduce a task relation distillation scheme that serves two purposes: 1) ensuring inter-task semantic consistency across different incremental learning tasks by minimizing inter-task relation distillation loss, and 2) enhancing the model's prediction confidence by minimizing intra-task self-entropy loss. Simultaneously, to mitigate background shift, we develop a prototypical pseudo label strategy that distinguishes old entity types from the current non-entity type using the old model. This strategy generates high-quality pseudo labels by measuring the distances between token embeddings and type-wise prototypes. We conducted extensive experiments on ten INER settings of three benchmark datasets (i.e., CoNLL2003, I2B2, and OntoNotes5). The results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art methods, with an average increase of 6.08% in Micro F1 score and 7.71% in Macro F1 score.