PredMapNet: Future and Historical Reasoning for Consistent Online HD Vectorized Map Construction

High-definition (HD) maps are crucial to autonomous driving, providing structured representations of road elements to support navigation and planning. However, existing query-based methods often employ random query initialization and depend on implicit temporal modeling, which lead to temporal inconsistencies and instabilities during the construction of a global map. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel end-to-end framework for consistent online HD vectorized map construction, which jointly performs map instance tracking and short-term prediction. First, we propose a Semantic-Aware Query Generator that initializes queries with spatially aligned semantic masks to capture scene-level context globally. Next, we design a History Rasterized Map Memory to store fine-grained instance-level maps for each tracked instance, enabling explicit historical priors. A History-Map Guidance Module then integrates rasterized map information into track queries, improving temporal continuity. Finally, we propose a Short-Term Future Guidance module to forecast the immediate motion of map instances based on the stored history trajectories. These predicted future locations serve as hints for tracked instances to further avoid implausible predictions and keep temporal consistency. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods with good efficiency.

FAST-EQA: Efficient Embodied Question Answering with Global and Local Region Relevancy

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) combines visual scene understanding, goal-directed exploration, spatial and temporal reasoning under partial observability. A central challenge is to confine physical search to question-relevant subspaces while maintaining a compact, actionable memory of observations. Furthermore, for real-world deployment, fast inference time during exploration is crucial. We introduce FAST-EQA, a question-conditioned framework that (i) identifies likely visual targets, (ii) scores global regions of interest to guide navigation, and (iii) employs Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning over visual memory to answer confidently. FAST-EQA maintains a bounded scene memory that stores a fixed-capacity set of region-target hypotheses and updates them online, enabling robust handling of both single and multi-target questions without unbounded growth. To expand coverage efficiently, a global exploration policy treats narrow openings and doors as high-value frontiers, complementing local target seeking with minimal computation. Together, these components focus the agent's attention, improve scene coverage, and improve answer reliability while running substantially faster than prior approaches. On HMEQA and EXPRESS-Bench, FAST-EQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, while performing competitively on OpenEQA and MT-HM3D.