Jiayi Lu

Bin Sun, Yaoguang Cao, Yan Wang et al.

End-to-End autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has emerged as a new paradigm, where trajectory planning plays a crucial role. Existing studies mainly follow two directions: trajectory generation oriented, which focuses on producing high-quality trajectories with simple decision mechanisms, and trajectory selection oriented, which performs multi-dimensional evaluation to select the best trajectory yet lacks sufficient generative capability. In this work, we propose MindDrive, a harmonized framework that integrates high-quality trajectory generation with comprehensive decision reasoning. It establishes a structured reasoning paradigm of "context simulation - candidate generation - multi-objective trade-off". In particular, the proposed Future-aware Trajectory Generator (FaTG), based on a World Action Model (WaM), performs ego-conditioned "what-if" simulations to predict potential future scenes and generate foresighted trajectory candidates. Building upon this, the VLM-oriented Evaluator (VLoE) leverages the reasoning capability of a large vision-language model to conduct multi-objective evaluations across safety, comfort, and efficiency dimensions, leading to reasoned and human-aligned decision making. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM-v1 and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks demonstrate that MindDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance across multi-dimensional driving metrics, significantly enhancing safety, compliance, and generalization. This work provides a promising path toward interpretable and cognitively guided autonomous driving.

Yanbin Hu, Jin Cui, Jiayi Lu et al.

Memory capacity is a critical factor determining the performance of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in long-horizon manipulation tasks. Existing memory-augmented architectures primarily rely on linear or flat storage, lacking structural priors for manipulation categories and hierarchical organization. This deficiency hinders efficient experience retrieval and limits generalization to unseen long-horizon task compositions. Inspired by the hierarchical organization of human experience, we propose ECHO (Experience Consolidation and Hierarchical Organization), a novel memory framework operating within a Continuous Hierarchical Space. By employing a hyperbolic autoencoder, ECHO maps VLA hidden states into this space. Leveraging hyperbolic metrics and entailment constraint mechanisms, experience vectors are organized into a semantic memory tree that supports efficient top-down retrieval. In parallel, a background consolidation mechanism continuously refines the memory tree through geometric interpolation and structural splitting, supporting virtual memory synthesis in the continuous space. We integrate ECHO into the $π_0$ foundation model. Evaluations on LIBERO and preliminary real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, notably achieving a 12.8% absolute improvement in execution success rate over the $π_0$ baseline on LIBERO-Long, while improving compositional generalization on cross-suite unseen long-horizon tasks.

Jin Cui, Jiaqi Guo, Jiepeng Zhou et al.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with remarkable capabilities but typically requires prohibitive parameter scales. CoT distillation has emerged as a promising paradigm to transfer reasoning prowess into compact Student Models (SLMs), but existing approaches often rely on a solitary teacher, capping the student's potential since individual LLMs often exhibit distinct capability biases and may suffer from catastrophic forgetting. While leveraging diverse teachers seems appealing, effectively fusing their supervisions remains challenging: teacher-student incompatibility risks amplifying hallucinations, and passive supervision fails to ensure genuine logic internalization. To address this, we introduce COMPACT, a framework that adaptively fuses supervisions from different teachers by dynamically weighting teacher gradients based on the student's real-time compatibility evaluated by a multi-dimensional metric: (1) Graph-based Consensus to filter misleading rationales by identifying mainstream reasoning paths; (2) Mutual-Information-based Adaptability to detect "epiphany moments" for genuinely understanding the reasoning process rather than merely imitating; and (3) Loss-based Difficulty to assess student receptivity to the teacher's guidance and prevent negative transfer. Extensive experiments and latent space analysis demonstrate that COMPACT effectively integrates diverse reasoning capabilities without damaging the model's original knowledge structure, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Jin Cui, Jiaqi Guo, Jiepeng Zhou et al.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged with remarkable capabilities in complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought reasoning, practical resource constraints have sparked interest in transferring these abilities to smaller models. However, achieving both domain performance and cross-domain generalization remains challenging. Existing approaches typically restrict students to following a single golden rationale and treat different reasoning paths independently. Due to distinct inductive biases and intrinsic preferences, alongside the student's evolving capacity and reasoning preferences during training, a teacher's "optimal" rationale could act as out-of-distribution noise. This misalignment leads to a degeneration of the student's latent reasoning distribution, causing suboptimal performance. To bridge this gap, we propose MIND, a capability-adaptive framework that transitions distillation from passive mimicry to active cognitive construction. We synthesize diverse teacher perspectives through a novel "Teaching Assistant" network. By employing a Feedback-Driven Inertia Calibration mechanism, this network utilizes inertia-filtered training loss to align supervision with the student's current adaptability, effectively enhancing performance while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIND achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks, and our sophisticated latent space analysis further confirms the mechanism of reasoning ability internalization.

Zihan Wang, Jiaze Chen, Zhicheng Liu et al.

Competitive programming has emerged as a critical benchmark for evaluating the reasoning and coding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite impressive progress on existing benchmarks, we argue that current evaluations overstate model proficiency, masking a substantial gap between LLMs and elite human programmers. This gap arises from two key limitations: insufficient difficulty and scope of benchmark problems, and evaluation bias from low-quality test cases. To address these shortcomings, we present AetherCode, a new benchmark that draws problems from premier programming competitions such as IOI and ICPC, offering broader coverage and higher difficulty. AetherCode further incorporates comprehensive, expert-validated test suites built through a hybrid of automated generation and human curation, ensuring rigorous and reliable assessment. By combining challenging problem design with robust evaluation, AetherCode provides a more faithful measure of LLM capabilities and sets a new standard for future research in code reasoning.

Bin Sun, Boao Zhang, Jiayi Lu et al.

In end-to-end autonomous driving,the motion prediction plays a pivotal role in ego-vehicle planning. However, existing methods often rely on globally aggregated motion features, ignoring the fact that planning decisions are primarily influenced by a small number of locally interacting agents. Failing to attend to these critical local interactions can obscure potential risks and undermine planning reliability. In this work, we propose FocalAD, a novel end-to-end autonomous driving framework that focuses on critical local neighbors and refines planning by enhancing local motion representations. Specifically, FocalAD comprises two core modules: the Ego-Local-Agents Interactor (ELAI) and the Focal-Local-Agents Loss (FLA Loss). ELAI conducts a graph-based ego-centric interaction representation that captures motion dynamics with local neighbors to enhance both ego planning and agent motion queries. FLA Loss increases the weights of decision-critical neighboring agents, guiding the model to prioritize those more relevant to planning. Extensive experiments show that FocalAD outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the open-loop nuScenes datasets and closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark. Notably, on the robustness-focused Adv-nuScenes dataset, FocalAD achieves even greater improvements, reducing the average colilision rate by 41.9% compared to DiffusionDrive and by 15.6% compared to SparseDrive.