HiMemVLN: Enhancing Reliability of Open-Source Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Memory System

LLM-based agents have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance in vision-language navigation (VLN) tasks. However, most zero-shot methods primarily rely on closed-source LLMs as navigators, which face challenges related to high token costs and potential data leakage risks. Recent efforts have attempted to address this by using open-source LLMs combined with a spatiotemporal CoT framework, but they still fall far short compared to closed-source models. In this work, we identify a critical issue, Navigation Amnesia, through a detailed analysis of the navigation process. This issue leads to navigation failures and amplifies the gap between open-source and closed-source methods. To address this, we propose HiMemVLN, which incorporates a Hierarchical Memory System into a multimodal large model to enhance visual perception recall and long-term localization, mitigating the amnesia issue and improving the agent's navigation performance. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that HiMemVLN achieves nearly twice the performance of the open-source state-of-the-art method. The code is available at https://github.com/lvkailin0118/HiMemVLN.

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.

Automating Hardware Design and Verification from Architectural Papers via a Neural-Symbolic Graph Framework

The reproduction of hardware architectures from academic papers remains a significant challenge due to the lack of publicly available source code and the complexity of hardware description languages (HDLs). To this end, we propose \textbf{ArchCraft}, a Framework that converts abstract architectural descriptions from academic papers into synthesizable Verilog projects with register-transfer level (RTL) verification. ArchCraft introduces a structured workflow, which uses formal graphs to capture the Architectural Blueprint and symbols to define the Functional Specification, translating unstructured academic papers into verifiable, hardware-aware designs. The framework then generates RTL and testbench (TB) code decoupled via these symbols to facilitate verification and debugging, ultimately reporting the circuit's Power, Area, and Performance (PPA). Moreover, we propose the first benchmark, \textbf{ArchSynthBench}, for synthesizing hardware from architectural descriptions, with a complete set of evaluation indicators, 50 project-level circuits, and around 600 circuit blocks. We systematically assess ArchCraft on ArchSynthBench, where the experiment results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, surpassing direct generation methods and the VerilogCoder framework in both paper understanding and code completion. Furthermore, evaluation and physical implementation of the generated executable RTL code show that these implementations meet all timing constraints without violations, and their performance metrics are consistent with those reported in the original papers.

A Challenging Benchmark of Anime Style Recognition

Given two images of different anime roles, anime style recognition (ASR) aims to learn abstract painting style to determine whether the two images are from the same work, which is an interesting but challenging problem. Unlike biometric recognition, such as face recognition, iris recognition, and person re-identification, ASR suffers from a much larger semantic gap but receives less attention. In this paper, we propose a challenging ASR benchmark. Firstly, we collect a large-scale ASR dataset (LSASRD), which contains 20,937 images of 190 anime works and each work at least has ten different roles. In addition to the large-scale, LSASRD contains a list of challenging factors, such as complex illuminations, various poses, theatrical colors and exaggerated compositions. Secondly, we design a cross-role protocol to evaluate ASR performance, in which query and gallery images must come from different roles to validate an ASR model is to learn abstract painting style rather than learn discriminative features of roles. Finally, we apply two powerful person re-identification methods, namely, AGW and TransReID, to construct the baseline performance on LSASRD. Surprisingly, the recent transformer model (i.e., TransReID) only acquires a 42.24% mAP on LSASRD. Therefore, we believe that the ASR task of a huge semantic gap deserves deep and long-term research. We will open our dataset and code at https://github.com/nkjcqvcpi/ASR.