Nan Zhang

Junjie Li, Nan Zhang, Xiaoyang Qu et al.

Object Navigation (ObjectNav) is a fundamental task in embodied artificial intelligence. Although significant progress has been made in semantic map construction and target direction prediction in current research, redundant exploration and exploration failures remain inevitable. A critical but underexplored direction is the timely termination of exploration to overcome these challenges. We observe a diminishing marginal effect between exploration steps and exploration rates and analyze the cost-benefit relationship of exploration. Inspired by this, we propose RATE-Nav, a Region-Aware Termination-Enhanced method. It includes a geometric predictive region segmentation algorithm and region-Based exploration estimation algorithm for exploration rate calculation. By leveraging the visual question answering capabilities of visual language models (VLMs) and exploration rates enables efficient termination.RATE-Nav achieves a success rate of 67.8% and an SPL of 31.3% on the HM3D dataset. And on the more challenging MP3D dataset, RATE-Nav shows approximately 10% improvement over previous zero-shot methods.

Yunqing Liu, Nan Zhang, Zhiming Tan

Effective specification-aware part retrieval within complex CAD assemblies is essential for automated design verification and downstream engineering tasks. However, directly using LLMs/VLMs to this task presents some challenges: the input sequences may exceed model token limits, and even after processing, performance remains unsatisfactory. Moreover, fine-tuning LLMs/VLMs requires significant computational resources, and for many high-performing general-use proprietary models (e.g., GPT or Gemini), fine-tuning access is not available. In this paper, we propose a novel part retrieval framework that requires no extra training, but using Error Notebooks + RAG for refined prompt engineering to help improve the existing general model's retrieval performance. The construction of Error Notebooks consists of two steps: (1) collecting historical erroneous CoTs and their incorrect answers, and (2) connecting these CoTs through reflective corrections until the correct solutions are obtained. As a result, the Error Notebooks serve as a repository of tasks along with their corrected CoTs and final answers. RAG is then employed to retrieve specification-relevant records from the Error Notebooks and incorporate them into the inference process. Another major contribution of our work is a human-in-the-loop CAD dataset, which is used to evaluate our method. In addition, the engineering value of our novel framework lies in its ability to effectively handle 3D models with lengthy, non-natural language metadata. Experiments with proprietary models, including GPT-4o and the Gemini series, show substantial gains, with GPT-4o (Omni) achieving up to a 23.4% absolute accuracy improvement on the human preference dataset. Moreover, ablation studies confirm that CoT reasoning provides benefits especially in challenging cases with higher part counts (>10).