Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in embodied navigation tasks. However, existing robot-centric datasets primarily focus on traditional 3D tasks such as perception and prediction, lacking adequate support for vision-language tasks. Vision-language-navigation (VLN) is a key capability for achieving human-like and interpretable navigation in complex environments. In this study, we present CoT-VLNBench, the first large-scale benchmark and dataset designed for chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in quadruped robot navigation. Our dataset encompasses a diverse range of indoor and outdoor scenes, multi-step navigation trajectories, and rich natural language instructions, all annotated with fine-grained CoT reasoning traces. Specifically, it contains 175K frames, 5.25M 3D bounding boxes, and 875K vision–question–answer (VQA) pairs. This comprehensive resource enables thorough evaluation of embodied agents’ perceptual and step-by-step reasoning abilities. Furthermore, we propose a novel CoT-VLN model, a state-of-the-art 7B VLN model that integrates visual, linguistic, and reasoning modules, to facilitate interpretable and effective navigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing non-VLMs baselines on the new benchmark, underscoring the importance of CoT-VLN in embodied navigation. We hope that CoT-VLNBench will serve as a valuable resource to advance research at the intersection of robotics, vision, language, and reasoning.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image registration is an essential upstream task in geoscience applications, in which pre-detected keypoints from two images are employed as observed objects to seek matched-point pairs. In general, the registration is regarded as a typical closed-set classification, which forces each keypoint to be classified into the given classes, but ignoring an essential issue that numerous redundant keypoints are beyond the given classes, which unavoidably results in capturing incorrect matched-point pairs. Based on this, we propose a Cross-Rejective Open-set SAR Image Registration (CroR-OSIR) method. In this work, these redundant keypoints are regarded as out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, and we formulate the registration as a special open-set task with two modules: supervised contrastive feature-tuning and cross-rejective open-set recognition (CroR-OSR). Unlike traditional open-set recognition, all samples, including OOD samples, are available in the CroR-OSR module. CroR-OSR conducts the closed-set classifications in individual open-set domains from two images, meanwhile employing the cross-domain rejection during training, to exclude these OOD samples based on confidence and consistency. Moreover, a new supervised contrastive tuning strategy is incorporated for feature-tuning. Especially, the cross-domain estimation labels obtained by CroR-OSR are fed back to the feature-tuning module for feature-tuning, to enhance feature discriminability. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed method achieves more precise registration than the state-of-the-art methods. The code is released at https://github.com/XDyaoshi/CroR-OSIR-main.

Multiple-instance learning (MIL) was initially proposed to identify key instances within a set (bag) of instances when only one bag-level label is provided. Current deep MIL models mostly solve multi-instance problem in feature space. Nevertheless, with the increasing complexity of data, we found this paradigm faces significant risks in representation learning stage, which could lead to algorithm degradation in deep MIL models. We speculate that the degradation issue stems from the persistent drift of instances in feature space during learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Probability-Space MIL network (PSMIL) as a countermeasure. In PSMIL, a self-training alignment strategy is introduced in probability space to cope with the drift problem in feature space, and the alignment target objective is proven mathematically optimal. Furthermore, we reveal that the widely-used attention-based pooling mechanism in current deep MIL models is easily affected by the perturbation in feature space and further introduce an alternative called probability-space attention pooling. It effectively captures the key instance in each bag from feature space to probability space, and further eliminates the impact of selection drift in the pooling stage. To summarize, PSMIL seeks to solve a MIL problem in probability space rather than feature space. Experimental results illustrate that PSMIL could potentially achieve performance close to supervised learning level in complex tasks (gap within 5\%), with the incremental alignment in propability space bring more than 19\% accuracy improvements for current existing mainstream models in simulated CIFAR datasets. For existing publicly available MIL benchmarks/datasets, attention in probability space also achieves competitive performance to the state-of-the-art deep MIL models. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/LMBDA-design/PSAMIL}.

In video analysis, an important challenge is insufficient annotated data due to the rare occurrence of the critical patterns, and we need to provide discriminative frame-level representation with limited annotation in some applications. Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is suitable for this scenario. However, many MIL models paid attention to analyzing the relationships between instance representations and aggregating them, but neglecting the critical information from the MIL problem itself, which causes difficultly achieving ideal instance-level performance compared with the supervised model. To address this issue, we propose the $\textbf{\textit{Regressor-Guided MIL network} (RGMIL)}$, which effectively produces discriminative instance-level representations in a general multi-classification scenario. In the proposed method, we make full use of the $\textit{regressor}$ through our newly introduced $\textit{aggregator}$, $\textbf{\textit{Regressor-Guided Pooling} (RGP)}$. RGP focuses on simulating the correct inference process of humans while facing similar problems without introducing new parameters, and the MIL problem can be accurately described through the critical information from the $\textit{regressor}$ in our method. In experiments, RGP shows dominance on more than 20 MIL benchmark datasets, with the average bag-level classification accuracy close to 1. We also perform a series of comprehensive experiments on the MMNIST dataset. Experimental results illustrate that our $\textit{aggregator}$ outperforms existing methods under different challenging circumstances. Instance-level predictions are even possible under the guidance of RGP information table in a long sequence. RGMIL also presents comparable instance-level performance with S-O-T-A supervised models in complicated applications. Statistical results demonstrate the assumption that a MIL model can compete with a supervised model at the instance level, as long as a structure that accurately describes the MIL problem is provided. The codes are available on $\url{https://github.com/LMBDA-design/RGMIL}$.