SocialNav: Training Human-Inspired Foundation Model for Socially-Aware Embodied Navigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21135v1
• Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2025 07:36:01 GMT
• Title: SocialNav: Training Human-Inspired Foundation Model for Socially-Aware Embodied Navigation
• Authors: Ziyi Chen, Yingnan Guo, Zedong Chu, Minghua Luo, Yanfen Shen, Mingchao Sun, Junjun Hu, Shichao Xie, Kuan Yang, Pei Shi, Zhining Gu, Lu Liu, Honglin Han, Xiaolong Wu, Mu Xu, Yu Zhang,
• Abstract summary: Embodied navigation that adheres to social norms remains an open research challenge.<n>SocialNav is a foundational model for socially-aware navigation with a hierarchical "brain-action" architecture.<n>SocialNav achieves +38% success rate and +46% social compliance rate compared to the state-of-the-art method.
• Score: 15.585324177543605
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Embodied navigation that adheres to social norms remains an open research challenge. Our \textbf{SocialNav} is a foundational model for socially-aware navigation with a hierarchical "brain-action" architecture, capable of understanding high-level social norms and generating low-level, socially compliant trajectories. To enable such dual capabilities, we construct the SocNav Dataset, a large-scale collection of 7 million samples, comprising (1) a Cognitive Activation Dataset providing social reasoning signals such as chain-of-thought explanations and social traversability prediction, and (2) an Expert Trajectories Pyramid aggregating diverse navigation demonstrations from internet videos, simulated environments, and real-world robots. A multi-stage training pipeline is proposed to gradually inject and refine navigation intelligence: we first inject general navigation skills and social norms understanding into the model via imitation learning, and then refine such skills through a deliberately designed Socially-Aware Flow Exploration GRPO (SAFE-GRPO), the first flow-based reinforcement learning framework for embodied navigation that explicitly rewards socially compliant behaviors. SocialNav achieves +38% success rate and +46% social compliance rate compared to the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating strong gains in both navigation performance and social compliance. Our project page: https://amap-eai.github.io/SocialNav/

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