Collaborative perception aims to address the constraint of single-agent perception by exchanging information among multiple agents. Previous works primarily focus on collaborative object detection, exploring compressed transmission and fusion prediction tailored to sparse object features. However, these strategies are not well-suited for dense features in collaborative BEV semantic segmentation. Therefore, we propose CoGMP, a novel Collaborative framework that leverages Generative Map Priors to achieve efficient compression and robust fusion. CoGMP introduces two key innovations: Element Format Feature Compression (EFFC) and Structure Guided Feature Fusion (SGFF). Specifically, EFFC leverages map element priors from codebook to encode BEV features as discrete element indices for transmitted information compression. Meanwhile, SGFF utilizes a diffusion model with structural priors to coherently integrate multi-agent features, thereby achieving consistent fusion predictions. Evaluations on the OPV2V dataset show that CoGMP achieves a 6.89/7.64 Road/Lane IoU improvement and a 32-fold reduction in communication volume.

Embodied intelligence, evolving from rule-based control to learning-driven systems, has primarily focused on rigid robots, whose limitations in flexibility and adaptability have spurred research into soft-bodied platforms inspired by biological organisms. Soft robots offer adaptive, safe solutions for human collaboration and complex environments but face challenges from underactuation and nonlinear dynamics. This workshop centers on multimodal perception and decision-making in soft robotics, gathering researchers to explore cutting-edge technologies, challenges, and solutions across areas like embodied navigation, manipulation, and control, with presentations and discussions on novel findings and methodologies.

Agile Earth Observation Satellites (AEOSs) constellations offer unprecedented flexibility for monitoring the Earth’s surface, but their scheduling remains challenging under large-scale scenarios, dynamic environments, and stringent constraints. Existing methods often simplify these complexities, limiting their real-world performance. We address this gap with a unified framework integrating a standardized benchmark suite and a novel scheduling model. Our benchmark suite, AEOS-Bench, contains $3,907$ finely tuned satellite assets and $16,410$ scenarios. Each scenario features $1$ to $50$ satellites and $50$ to $300$ imaging tasks. These scenarios are generated via a high-fidelity simulation platform, ensuring realistic satellite behavior such as orbital dynamics and resource constraints. Ground truth scheduling annotations are provided for each scenario. To our knowledge, AEOS-Bench is the first large-scale benchmark suite tailored for realistic constellation scheduling. Building upon this benchmark, we introduce AEOS-Former, a Transformer-based scheduling model that incorporates a constraint-aware attention mechanism. A dedicated internal constraint module explicitly models the physical and operational limits of each satellite. Through simulation-based iterative learning, AEOS-Former adapts to diverse scenarios, offering a robust solution for AEOS constellation scheduling. Experimental results demonstrate that AEOS-Former outperforms baseline models in task completion and energy efficiency, with ablation studies highlighting the contribution of each component. Code and data are provided in https://github.com/buaa-colalab/AEOSBench.

Modern image generation (IG) models have been shown to capture rich semantics valuable for image understanding (IU) tasks. However, the potential of IU models to improve IG performance remains uncharted. We address this issue using a token-based IG framework, which relies on effective tokenizers to project images into token sequences. Currently, **pixel reconstruction** (e.g., VQGAN) dominates the training objective for image tokenizers. In contrast, our approach adopts the **feature reconstruction** objective, where tokenizers are trained by distilling knowledge from pretrained IU encoders. Comprehensive comparisons indicate that tokenizers with strong IU capabilities achieve superior IG performance across a variety of metrics, datasets, tasks, and proposal networks. Notably, VQ-KD CLIP achieves $4.10$ FID on ImageNet-1k (IN-1k). Visualization suggests that the superiority of VQ-KD can be partly attributed to the rich semantics within the VQ-KD codebook. We further introduce a straightforward pipeline to directly transform IU encoders into tokenizers, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness for IG tasks. These discoveries may energize further exploration into image tokenizer research and inspire the community to reassess the relationship between IU and IG. The code is released at https://github.com/magic-research/vector_quantization.

Given a high-level instruction, the task of Embodied Referring Expression (REVERIE) requires an embodied agent to localise a remote referred object via navigating in the unseen environment. Previous vision-language navigation methods utilise the provided fine-grained instruction as step-by-step navigation guidance to conduct strict instruction-following, while REVERIE aims to achieve efficient goal-oriented exploration according to the high-level command. In this work, we propose a Cross-modal Knowledge Reasoning (abbreviated as CKR+) framework, which incorporates the prior knowledge as decision guidance to learn the navigation scheme comprehensively. Specifically, we design a Room-Object Aware (ROA) mechanism to explicitly decouple the room- and object-related clues from instruction and visual observations. Moreover, we propose a Knowledge-enabled Entity Relation Reasoning (KERR+) module to leverage the structured knowledge from the knowledge graph explicitly and unstructured knowledge from pre-trained model implicitly, to learn the internal-external correlations among room- and object-entities for the agent to make proper decisions. We devise an Entity Prompter (EP) that embeds in the KERR+ module, which utilises the navigation history and visual entities as prompts to transfer knowledge from the pre-trained CLIP model. In addition, we develop a Reinforced End Decider (RED) to learn the stopping scheme specifically, which is achieved by a customised reinforcement learning strategy and knowledge enhanced matching. Two techniques are also introduced to improve navigation efficiency further. Extensive experiments conducted on the REVERIE benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed methods, which boosts the key metrics, i.e., SPL and REVERIE-success rate, to 14.46% and 13.81% respectively.

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to provide object detectors trained on a fixed set of object categories with the generalizability to detect objects described by arbitrary text queries. Previous methods adopt knowledge distillation to extract knowledge from Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (PVLMs) and transfer it to detectors. However, due to the non-adaptive proposal cropping and single-level feature mimicking processes, they suffer from information destruction during knowledge extraction and inefficient knowledge transfer. To remedy these limitations, we propose an Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid (OADP) framework, including an Object-Aware Knowledge Extraction (OAKE) module and a Distillation Pyramid (DP) mechanism. When extracting object knowledge from PVLMs, the former adaptively transforms object proposals and adopts object-aware mask attention to obtain precise and complete knowledge of objects. The latter introduces global and block distillation for more comprehensive knowledge transfer to compensate for the missing relation information in object distillation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement compared to current methods. Especially on the MS-COCO dataset, our OADP framework reaches 35.6 mAPN50, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 3.3 mAPN50. Code is released at https://github.com/LutingWang/OADP.

The Remote Embodied Referring Expression (REVERIE) is a recently raised task that requires an agent to navigate to and localise a referred remote object according to a high-level language instruction. Different from related VLN tasks, the key to REVERIE is to conduct goal-oriented exploration instead of strict instruction-following, due to the lack of step-by-step navigation guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-modality Knowledge Reasoning (CKR) model to address the unique challenges of this task. The CKR, based on a transformer-architecture, learns to generate scene memory tokens and utilise these informative history clues for exploration. Particularly, a Room-and-Object Aware Attention (ROAA) mechanism is devised to explicitly perceive the room- and object-type information from both linguistic and visual observations. Moreover, through incorporating commonsense knowledge, we propose a Knowledge-enabled Entity Relationship Reasoning (KERR) module to learn the internal-external correlations among room- and object-entities for agent to make proper action at each viewpoint. Evaluation on REVERIE benchmark demonstrates the superiority of the CKR model, which significantly boosts SPL and REVERIE-success rate by 64.67% and 46.05%, respectively. Code is available at: https://github.com/alloldman/CKR.