Learning to Plan like the Human Brain via Visuospatial Perception and Semantic-Episodic Synergistic Decision-Making

Abstract

Motion planning in high-dimensional continuous spaces remains challenging due to complex environments and computational constraints. Although learning-based planners, especially graph neural network (GNN)-based, have significantly improved planning performance, they still struggle with inaccurate graph construction and limited structural reasoning, constraining search efficiency and path quality. The human brain exhibits efficient planning through a two-stage Perception-Decision model. First, egocentric spatial representations from visual and proprioceptive input are constructed, and then semantic–episodic synergy is leveraged to support decision-making in uncertainty scenarios. Inspired by this process, we propose NeuroMP, a brain-inspired planning framework that learns to plan like the human brain. NeuroMP integrates a Perceptive Segment Selector inspired by visuospatial perception to construct safer graphs, and a Global Alignment Heuristic guide search in weakly connected graphs by modeling semantic-episodic synergistic decision-making. Experimental results demonstrate that NeuroMP significantly outperforms existing planning methods in efficiency and quality while maintaining a high success rate.

Cite

Text

Jia et al. "Learning to Plan like the Human Brain via Visuospatial Perception and Semantic-Episodic Synergistic Decision-Making." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.

Markdown

[Jia et al. "Learning to Plan like the Human Brain via Visuospatial Perception and Semantic-Episodic Synergistic Decision-Making." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2025/jia2025neurips-learning/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{jia2025neurips-learning,
  title     = {{Learning to Plan like the Human Brain via Visuospatial Perception and Semantic-Episodic Synergistic Decision-Making}},
  author    = {Jia, Tianyuan and Li, Ziyu and Li, Qing and Li, Xiuxing and Li, Xiang and Wei, Chen and Yao, Li and Wu, Xia},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2025/jia2025neurips-learning/}
}