Wild-Drive: Off-Road Scene Captioning and Path Planning via Robust Multi-modal Routing and Efficient Large Language Model

Explainability and transparent decision-making are essential for the safe deployment of autonomous driving systems. Scene captioning summarizes environmental conditions and risk factors in natural language, improving transparency, safety, and human--robot interaction. However, most existing approaches target structured urban scenarios; in off-road environments, they are vulnerable to single-modality degradations caused by rain, fog, snow, and darkness, and they lack a unified framework that jointly models structured scene captioning and path planning. To bridge this gap, we propose Wild-Drive, an efficient framework for off-road scene captioning and path planning. Wild-Drive adopts modern multimodal encoders and introduces a task-conditioned modality-routing bridge, MoRo-Former, to adaptively aggregate reliable information under degraded sensing. It then integrates an efficient large language model (LLM), together with a planning token and a gate recurrent unit (GRU) decoder, to generate structured captions and predict future trajectories. We also build the OR-C2P Benchmark, which covers structured off-road scene captioning and path planning under diverse sensor corruption conditions. Experiments on OR-C2P dataset and a self-collected dataset show that Wild-Drive outperforms prior LLM-based methods and remains more stable under degraded sensing. The code and benchmark will be publicly available at https://github.com/wangzihanggg/Wild-Drive.

The RoboSense Challenge: Sense Anything, Navigate Anywhere, Adapt Across Platforms

Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open and dynamic environments -- from city streets to aerial and indoor spaces -- where perception models must remain reliable under sensor noise, environmental variation, and platform shifts. However, even state-of-the-art methods often degrade under unseen conditions, highlighting the need for robust and generalizable robot sensing. The RoboSense 2025 Challenge is designed to advance robustness and adaptability in robot perception across diverse sensing scenarios. It unifies five complementary research tracks spanning language-grounded decision making, socially compliant navigation, sensor configuration generalization, cross-view and cross-modal correspondence, and cross-platform 3D perception. Together, these tasks form a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating real-world sensing reliability under domain shifts, sensor failures, and platform discrepancies. RoboSense 2025 provides standardized datasets, baseline models, and unified evaluation protocols, enabling large-scale and reproducible comparison of robust perception methods. The challenge attracted 143 teams from 85 institutions across 16 countries, reflecting broad community engagement. By consolidating insights from 23 winning solutions, this report highlights emerging methodological trends, shared design principles, and open challenges across all tracks, marking a step toward building robots that can sense reliably, act robustly, and adapt across platforms in real-world environments.