Shuangming Lei

Ruoyu Wang, Jingke Wang, Yukai Ma et al.

Recently, world models have made significant progress in enhancing end-to-end driving systems through both future situation forecasting and improved scene understanding. However, existing driving world models are typically built upon dense scene representations, causing high computational costs and redundant information. In this paper, we present SparseWorld, a lightweight world model that focuses on predicting only the critical layout of the scene, enabling efficient future forecasting for end-to-end driving systems. SparseWorld first performs autoregressive rollout to forecast future map elements and surrounding agents, enabling the model to learn how driving scenarios evolve over time. It then leverages these predicted futures to refine downstream motion prediction and trajectory planning. Specifically, we propose a Sparse Dreamer that anticipates future instances in the latent space through joint temporal and spatial attention. By interacting with predicted future instances, the motion planner captures more accurate motion patterns and generates more informed and safety-aware trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SparseWorld significantly reduces collision risk and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the open-loop planning metrics of the nuScenes dataset with a collision rate of 0.05\%. Moreover, it substantially outperforms the baseline method in closed-loop planning metrics on the Bench2Drive benchmark. Supplementary material is available at the project page: https://wryzju.github.io/SparseWorld/.

Yuehao Huang, Liang Liu, Shuangming Lei et al.

Mobile robots are increasingly required to navigate and interact within unknown and unstructured environments to meet human demands. Demand-driven navigation (DDN) enables robots to identify and locate objects based on implicit human intent, even when object locations are unknown. However, traditional data-driven DDN methods rely on pre-collected data for model training and decision-making, limiting their generalization capability in unseen scenarios. In this paper, we propose CogDDN, a VLM-based framework that emulates the human cognitive and learning mechanisms by integrating fast and slow thinking systems and selectively identifying key objects essential to fulfilling user demands. CogDDN identifies appropriate target objects by semantically aligning detected objects with the given instructions. Furthermore, it incorporates a dual-process decision-making module, comprising a Heuristic Process for rapid, efficient decisions and an Analytic Process that analyzes past errors, accumulates them in a knowledge base, and continuously improves performance. Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning strengthens the decision-making process. Extensive closed-loop evaluations on the AI2Thor simulator with the ProcThor dataset show that CogDDN outperforms single-view camera-only methods by 15\%, demonstrating significant improvements in navigation accuracy and adaptability. The project page is available at https://yuehaohuang.github.io/CogDDN/.