Abstract--Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires agents to navigate previously unseen and continuous spaces based on natural language instructions. Compared to discrete settings, VLN-CE poses two core perception challenges. First, the absence of predefined observation points leads to heterogeneous visual memories and weakened global spatial correlations. Second, cumulative reconstruction errors in three-dimensional scenes introduce structural noise, impairing local feature perception. T o address these challenges, this paper proposes ST -Booster, an iterative spatiotemporal booster that enhances navigation performance through multi-granularity perception and instruction-aware reasoning. ST -Booster consists of three key modules -- Hierarchical SpatioT emporal Encoding (HSTE), Multi-Granularity Aligned Fusion (MGAF), and V alue-Guided Waypoint Generation (VGWG). The resulting representations are iteratively refined through pretraining tasks. During reasoning, VGWG generates Guided Attention Heatmaps (GAHs) to explicitly model environment-instruction relevance and optimize waypoint selection. Extensive comparative experiments and performance analyses are conducted, demonstrating that ST -Booster outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly in complex, disturbance-prone environments.

A good initialization of deep learning models is essential since it can help them converge better and faster. However, pretraining large models is unaffordable for many researchers, which makes a desired prediction for initial parameters more necessary nowadays. Graph HyperNetworks (GHNs), one approach to predicting model parameters, have recently shown strong performance in initializing large vision models. Unfortunately, predicting parameters of very wide networks relies on copying small chunks of parameters multiple times and requires an extremely large number of parameters to support full prediction, which greatly hinders its adoption in practice. To address this limitation, we propose LoGAH (Low-rank GrAph Hypernetworks), a GHN with a low-rank parameter decoder that expands to significantly wider networks without requiring as excessive increase of parameters as in previous attempts. LoGAH allows us to predict the parameters of 774-million large neural networks in a memory-efficient manner. We show that vision and language models (i.e., ViT and GPT-2) initialized with LoGAH achieve better performance than those initialized randomly or using existing hypernetworks. Furthermore, we show promising transfer learning results w.r.t. training LoGAH on small datasets and using the predicted parameters to initialize for larger tasks. We provide the codes in https://github.com/Blackzxy/LoGAH .

Increase in greenhouse gases emission from the transportation sector has led companies and government to elevate and support the production of electric vehicles. The natural synergy between increased support for electric and emergence of autonomous vehicles possibly can relieve the limitations regarding access to charging infrastructure, time management, and range anxiety. In this work, a fleet of Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEV) is considered for transportation and logistic capabilities with limited battery capacity and scarce charging station availability are considered while planning to avoid inefficient routing strategies. We introduce a min-max autonomous electric vehicle routing problem (AEVRP) where the maximum distance traveled by any AEV is minimized while considering charging stations for recharging. We propose a genetic algorithm based meta-heuristic that can efficiently solve a variety of instances. Extensive computational results, sensitivity analysis, and data-driven simulation implemented with the robot operating system (ROS) middleware are performed to corroborate the efficiency of the proposed approach, both quantitatively and qualitatively.