# Exploiting Proximity-Aware Tasks for Embodied Social Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.00767 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00767/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05363/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/) (2020)
- [Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08835/) (2018)
- [iGibson 1.0: a Simulation Environment for Interactive Tasks in Large Realistic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02924/) (2020)
- [PONI: Potential Functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10029/) (2022)
- [Socially Aware Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08862/) (2017)
- [Socially Compliant Navigation Dataset (SCAND): A Large-Scale Dataset of Demonstrations for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15041/) (2022)
- [Decentralized Non-communicating Multiagent Collision Avoidance with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07845/) (2016)
- [Habitat-Web: Learning Embodied Object-Search Strategies from Human Demonstrations at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03514/) (2022)
- [Embodied Question Answering in Photorealistic Environments with Point Cloud Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03461/) (2019)
- [MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03912/) (2020)
- [Interactive Gibson Benchmark (iGibson 0.5): A Benchmark for Interactive Navigation in Cluttered Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14442/) (2019)
- [Auxiliary Tasks Speed Up Learning PointGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04561/) (2020)
- [Socially Compliant Navigation through Raw Depth Inputs with Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02543/) (2017)
- [Retrospectives on the Embodied AI Workshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06849/) (2022)
- [Neural Predictive Belief Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06407/) (2018)
- [TH"OR: Human-Robot Navigation Data Collection and Accurate Motion Trajectories Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04403/) (2019)
- [Is Mapping Necessary for Realistic PointGoal Navigation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00997/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [MOPA: Modular Object Navigation with PointGoal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03696/) (2023)
- [From Cognition to Precognition: A Future-Aware Framework for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13244/) (2024)
- [Following the Human Thread in Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11327/) (2024)
- [Personalized Embodied Navigation for Portable Object Finding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09905/) (2024)
- [Measuring Physical-World Privacy Awareness of Large Language Models: An Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02356/) (2025)
- [Learning to Navigate Socially Through Proactive Risk Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07871/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning how to navigate among humans in an occluded and spatially constrained indoor environment, is a key ability required to embodied agent to be integrated into our society. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end architecture that exploits Proximity-Aware Tasks (referred as to Risk and Proximity Compass) to inject into a reinforcement learning navigation policy the ability to infer common-sense social behaviors. To this end, our tasks exploit the notion of immediate and future dangers of collision. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation protocol specifically designed for the Social Navigation Task in simulated environments. This is done to capture fine-grained features and characteristics of the policy by analyzing the minimal unit of human-robot spatial interaction, called Encounter. We validate our approach on Gibson4+ and Habitat-Matterport3D datasets.