From reactive to cognitive: brain-inspired spatial intelligence for embodied agents

Shouwei Ruan, Liyuan Wang, Tim Kang, Qihui Zhu, Songming Liu, Xingxing Wei, Hang Su

From reactive to cognitive: brain-inspired spatial intelligence for embodied agents: 10 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #5 of 7 papers on 2025-09-02. Day-by-day upvote history.

Spatial cognition enables adaptive goal-directed behavior by constructing internal models of space. Robust biological systems consolidate spatial knowledge into three interconnected forms: landmarks for salient cues, route knowledge for movement trajectories, and survey knowledge for map-like representations. While recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled visual-language reasoning in embodied agents, these efforts lack structured spatial memory and instead operate reactively, limiting their generalization and adaptability in complex real-world environments. Here we present Brain-inspired Spatial Cognition for Navigation (BSC-Nav), a unified framework for constructing and leveraging structured spatial memory in embodied agents. BSC-Nav builds allocentric cognitive maps from egocentric trajectories and contextual cues, and dynamically retrieves spatial knowledge aligned with semantic goals. Integrated with powerful MLLMs, BSC-Nav achieves state-of-the-art efficacy and efficiency across diverse navigation tasks, demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, and supports versatile embodied behaviors in the real physical world, offering a scalable and biologically grounded path toward general-purpose spatial intelligence.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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