Dong An Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) Email: dong[dot]an[at]mbzuai[dot]ac[dot]ae

About Me

I'm a Research Scientist at Institute of Foundation Models, MBZUAI, I study Physical AI. Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at MBZUAI, working with Prof. Ian Reid. I received my Ph.D. from Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) in 2024 (advised by Prof. Tieniu Tan, Prof. Liang Wang and Prof. Yan Huang), and my B.S. from Peking University (PKU) in 2019.

Publications

* equal contribution

• ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

  Dong An, Hanqing Wang, Wenguan Wang, Zun Wang, Yan Huang, Keji He, Liang Wang

  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2024. [Paper] [Code]

• BEVBert: Multimodal Map Pre-training for Language-guided Navigation

  Dong An, Yuankai Qi, Yangguang Li, Yan Huang, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan, Jing Shao

  International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023. [Paper] [Code]

• 1st Place Solutions for RxR-Habitat Vision-and-Language Navigation Competition

  Dong An*, Zun Wang*, Yangguang Li, Yi Wang, Yicong Hong, Yan Huang, Liang Wang, Jing Shao

  Room-Across-Room (RxR) Habitat Challenge (CVPR Embodied AI Workshop), 2022. [Paper]

• Neighbor-view Enhanced Model for Vision and Language Navigation

  Dong An, Yuankai Qi, Yan Huang, Qi Wu, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan

  ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2021. (Oral) [Paper] [Code]

• Cross from left to right brain: Adaptive text dreamer for vision-and-language navigation

  Pingrui Zhang, Yifei Su, Pengyuan Wu, Dong An, Li Zhang, Zhigang Wang, Dong Wang, Yan Ding, Bin Zhao, Xuelong Li

  Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026. [Paper] [Code]

• Constraint-Aware Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

  Kehan Chen*, Dong An*, Yan Huang, Rongtao Xu, Yifei Su, Yonggen Ling, Ian Reid, Liang Wang

  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2025. [Paper] [Webpage] [Code]

• NavBench: Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Embodied Navigation

  Yanyuan Qiao, Haodong Hong, Wenqi Lyu, Dong An, Siqi Zhang, Yutong Xie, Xinyu Wang, Qi Wu

  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025. [Paper] [Webpage] [Code]

• Learning Fine-Grained Alignment for Aerial Vision-Dialog Navigation

  Yifei Su, Dong An, Kehan Chen, Weichen Yu, Baiyang Ning, Yonggen Ling, Yan Huang, Liang Wang

  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025.

• Action Tokenizer Matters in In-Context Imitation Learning

  An Dinh Vuong, Minh Nhat Vu, Dong An, Ian Reid

  International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025.

• 3D-MoRe: Unified Modal-Contextual Reasoning for Embodied Question Answering

  Rongtao Xu, Han Gao, Mingming Yu, Dong An, Shunpeng Chen, Changwei Wang, Li Guo, Xiaodan Liang, Shibiao Xu

  International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025.

• Language and Planning in Robotic Navigation: A Multilingual Evaluation of State-of-the-Art Models

  Malak Mansour, Ahmed Aly, Bahey Tharwat, Sarim Hashmi, Dong An, Ian Reid

  Workshop on Planning in the Era of LLMs (LM4Plan @ AAAI), 2025. [Paper]

• Memory-Adaptive Vision-and-Language Navigation

  Keji He, Ya Jing, Yan Huang, Zhihe Lu, Dong An, Liang Wang

  Pattern Recognition (PR), 2024. [Paper]

• Target-Grounded Graph-Aware Transformer for Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation

  Yifei Su, Dong An, Yuan Xu, Kehan Chen, Yan Huang

  Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (AVDN) Challenge (ICCV CLVL Workshop), 2023. [Paper] [Code]

• Neighbor Regularized Bayesian Optimization for Hyperparameter Optimization

  Lei Cui, Yangguang Li, Xin Lu, Dong An, Fenggang Liu

  British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2022. [Paper]

• Landmark-RxR: Solving Vision-and-Language Navigation with Fine-Grained Alignment Supervision

  Keji He, Yan Huang, Qi Wu, Jianhua Yang, Dong An, Shuanglin Sima, Liang Wang

  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021. [Paper] [Code]

Competitions

Challenge of Multimodal Robot Learning in InternUtopia and Real World @ IROS 2025. Our team LittleRed (Dong An, Yongxin Wang, Meng Cao, Ian Reid) is the runner-up. See details here: Results of VLN-PE Challenge 2025.

Aerial Vision-and-Dialogue Navigation Challenge @ ICCV 2023 . Our team susanping (Yifei Su, Dong An, Yuan Xu, Kehan Chen, Yan Huang) is the champion. See details here: Results of AVDN Challenge 2023.

RxR-Habitat Vision-and-Language Navigation Challenge @ CVPR 2022 . Our team Joyboy (Dong An*, Zun Wang*, Yangguang Li, Yi Wang, Yicong Hong, Yan Huang, Liang Wang, Jing Shao) is the champion. See details here: Results of RxR-Habitat 2022.

REVERIE Challenge @ CSIG 2022. Our team TouchFish (Dong An, Yifei Su, Shuanglin Sima, Hongyuan Yu, Weichen Yu, Yan Huang) is the runner-up of both channels. See details here: Results of REVERIE Challenge 2022.

Learning and Mining with Noisy Labels Challenge @ IJCAI-ECAI 2022. Our team (Weichen Yu, Hongyuan Yu, Yan Huang, Dong An, Keji He, Zhipeng Zhang, Xiuchuan Li, Liang Wang) is the runner-up of task 1-1 and 2nd runner-up of task 1-2. See details here: Results.

Professional Activities

• Champion invited talk at Embodied AI Workshop @ CVPR 2022

• Reviewer: TPAMI, TMLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, IJCAI, AAAI, ACM MM, ICRA

Honors and Awards

• 2025, Runner-up of VLN-PE in InternUtopia and Real World Challenge, IROS 2025 [VLN-PE Certificate]

• 2023, Champion of AVDN Challenge, ICCV 2023 [AVDN Certificate]

• 2022, Champion of RxR-Habitat Challenge, CVPR 2022 [RxR-Habitat Certificate]

• 2022, Runner-up of REVERIE Challenge, CSIG 2022 [REVERIE Certificate_1] [REVERIE Certificate_2]

• 2022, Runner-up of Learning and Mining with Noisy Labels Challenge, IJCAI-ECAI 2022 [Noisy-Labels Certificate]

• 2021, Outstanding Student of CAS

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke

Next token prediction is actually a much deeper question than it seems. -- Ilya Sutskever