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

Tianyuan Jia, Ziyu Li, Qing Li, Xiuxing Li, Xiang Li, Chen Wei, Li Yao, Xia Wu

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

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.