Like Liu
BEng in Software Engineering
School of Software
Northwestern Polytechnical University
Research Interests
- Embodied Intelligence
- UAV Vision-Language Navigation
- UAV 3D Spatial Understanding
- Intelligent Video Understanding
About
I am an undergraduate student in the School of Software, Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), expected to graduate in June 2026. I am currently working under the guidance of Prof. Dian Shao at the Unmanned Systems Research Institute, NPU.
My research focuses on intelligent video understanding, embodied AI, UAV Vision-Language Navigation, and UAV spatial reasoning. I am passionate about applying AI algorithms to unmanned vehicles and exploring cognitive intelligence in embodied AI systems.
I have published papers at conferences including CVPR 2026 Findings, AAAI 2026, and have patents and translated work in fields like computer vision and robotics.
I'm currently seeking Ph.D./MPhil opportunities, if you’re interested in my work or would like to discuss potential opportunities, please feel free to email me—I look forward to connecting and will respond promptly!
Selected Publications
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Vision-And-Language Navigation for Unmanned Systems: Progress and Perspectives
Dian Shao†, Like Liu, Zhengzheng Xu, Junqiang Bai
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Unmanned Systems (ICAUS 2025)
This survey traces the evolution of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) from indoor to outdoor/aerial settings, emphasizing how foundation models (VLMs/LLMs) enable zero-shot, language-guided autonomy through open-vocabulary perception and reasoning, while reviewing benchmarks, methods, challenges, and future directions for intelligent embodied agents.
Knowing the Self, Understanding the World: A Dual-Cognition Benchmark for UAV Spatio-temporal Reasoning with MLLMs
Like Liu, Haitao He, Zhengzheng Xu, Hongzhe Li, Shuchang Zhang, Dian Shao†
Submitted to ACM MM 2026 Dataset Track
We introduce UAV-DualCog, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal LLMs on aerial dual-cognition tasks (reasoning about both UAV self-state and environment state in multiview spatio-temporal contexts) and show that current lightweight MLLMs struggle significantly, especially with self-state understanding.
FineCog-Nav: Integrating Fine-grained Cognitive Modules for Zero-shot Multimodal UAV Navigation
Dian Shao†, Zhengzheng Xu, Peiyang Wang, Like Liu, Yule Wang, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo
Findings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026 (CVPR 2026 Findings)
We propose FineCog-Nav, a cognitive-inspired, modular zero-shot framework for UAV vision-language navigation, where specialized moderate-sized models handle distinct reasoning functions; evaluated on our new fine-grained benchmark AerialVLN-Fine, it outperforms existing baselines in instruction following, long-horizon planning, and generalization.
FineTec: Fine-Grained Action Recognition under Temporal Corruption via Skeleton Decomposition and Sequence Completion
Dian Shao†, Mingfei Shi, Like Liu
Proceedings of the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
We propose FineTec, a robust framework for fine-grained action recognition from temporally corrupted skeleton sequences, which combines context-aware skeleton completion, semantic spatial decomposition, physics-driven acceleration estimation, and GCN-based fusion—achieving state-of-the-art performance on both coarse- and fine-grained benchmarks under severe data corruption.
Intelligent UAVs Empowered by Large Models: Progress, Applications and Perspectives
Dian Shao†, Chu Tang, Min Chang, Like Liu, Yule Wang, Hao Li, Junqiang Bai
Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica
This survey explores how Large Foundation Models (LFMs) are transforming UAV intelligence—covering architectures, core function enhancements (perception to interaction), high-level cognitive capabilities (reasoning, memory, etc.), applications in key decision-making tasks, and challenges in safety, deployment, and future directions toward efficient, cognition-aware, and collaborative aerial systems.
News
One paper has been submitted to ACM MM 2026 Dataset Track🎓
Started new research project on Aerial Spatial Reasoning
One paper has been accepted by Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica 🎓
One paper has been accepted by CVPR 2026 Findings 🎓
One paper has been accepted by AAAI 2026 🎓
One paper has been accepted by ICAUS 2025 🎓
Started new research project on Zero-shot UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation
Started new research project on Fine-grained Action Recognition
Attended COP29 as NPU Student Representative in Baku, Azerbaijan 🌍
Won Second Prize in Challenge Cup 2024 🏆
Completed internship at QingCloud Technology as AI Development Engineer