mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Navigation

arXiv 2306.01874 ↗First posted 2 Jun 2023cs.RO cs.CV cs.LGcited by 61

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Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning provides a powerful tool for building socially compliant robotic systems that go beyond simple predictive models of human behavior. By observing and understanding human interactions from past experiences, learning can enable effective social navigation behaviors directly from data. In this paper, our goal is to develop methods for training policies for socially unobtrusive navigation, such that robots can navigate among humans in ways that don't disturb human behavior. We introduce a definition for such behavior based on the counterfactual perturbation of the human: if the robot had not intruded into the space, would the human have acted in the same way? By minimizing this counterfactual perturbation, we can induce robots to behave in ways that do not alter the natural behavior of humans in the shared space. Instantiating this principle requires training policies to minimize their effect on human behavior, and this in turn requires data that allows us to model the behavior of humans in the presence of robots. Therefore, our approach is based on two key contributions. First, we collect a large dataset where an indoor mobile robot interacts with human bystanders. Second, we utilize this dataset to train policies that minimize counterfactual perturbation. We provide supplementary videos and make publicly available the largest-of-its-kind visual navigation dataset on our project page.

Key facts. Cited by 61 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 29 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2023.

Builds on

29 of 55 references.

References · 29

  1. 2015You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 4,852
  2. 2017Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metriccited by 910
  3. 2018On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agentscited by 547
  4. 2018Semi-parametric Topological Memory for Navigationcited by 209
  5. 2018Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 175
  6. 2022GNM: A General Navigation Model to Drive Any Robotcited by 171
  7. 2017Socially Aware Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 136
  8. 2022Socially Compliant Navigation Dataset (SCAND): A Large-Scale Dataset of Demonstrations for Social Navigationcited by 127
  9. 2021Actionable Models: Unsupervised Offline Reinforcement Learning of Robotic Skillscited by 125
  10. 2021Rapid Exploration for Open-World Navigation with Latent Goal Modelscited by 121
  11. 2016Decentralized Non-communicating Multiagent Collision Avoidance with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 118
  12. 2018Motion Planning Among Dynamic, Decision-Making Agents with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 111
17 more
  1. 2021Core Challenges of Social Robot Navigation: A Surveycited by 106
  2. 2022ViKiNG: Vision-Based Kilometer-Scale Navigation with Geographic Hintscited by 58
  3. 2019Deep Visual MPC-Policy Learning for Navigationcited by 56
  4. 2022Topological Semantic Graph Memory for Image-Goal Navigationcited by 45
  5. 2019Scaling Local Control to Large-Scale Topological Navigationcited by 37
  6. 2019TH"OR: Human-Robot Navigation Data Collection and Accurate Motion Trajectories Datasetcited by 36
  7. 2023Toward Human-Like Social Robot Navigation: A Large-Scale, Multi-Modal, Social Human Navigation Datasetcited by 31
  8. 2022Learning Model Predictive Controllers with Real-Time Attention for Real-World Navigationcited by 29
  9. 2022ExAug: Robot-Conditioned Navigation Policies via Geometric Experience Augmentationcited by 19
  10. 2018A Scalable Framework For Real-Time Multi-Robot, Multi-Human Collision Avoidancecited by 10
  11. 2022Spatio-Temporal Graph Localization Networks for Image-based Navigationcited by 10
  12. 2022Occlusion-Aware Crowd Navigation Using People as Sensorscited by 9
  13. 2020An Approach to Deploy Interactive Robotic Simulators on the Web for HRI Experiments: Results in Social Robot Navigationcited by 7
  14. 2020Robot Perception of Static and Dynamic Objects with an Autonomous Floor Scrubbercited by 6
  15. 2020EWareNet: Emotion Aware Human Intent Prediction and Adaptive Spatial Profile Fusion for Social Robot Navigationcited by 6
  16. 2022Metrics for Evaluating Social Conformity of Crowd Navigation Algorithmscited by 3
  17. 2023SG-LSTM: Social Group LSTM for Robot Navigation Through Dense Crowdscited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 10; 2025: 23; 2026: 26.

61 papers.

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  1. 2024Navigation World Modelscited by 272
  2. 2023ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigationcited by 222
  3. 2025Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics: A Review Towards Real-World Applicationscited by 84
  4. 2025NavDP: Learning Sim-to-Real Navigation Diffusion Policy with Privileged Information Guidancecited by 49
  5. 2024VLM-Social-Nav: Socially Aware Robot Navigation through Scoring using Vision-Language Modelscited by 46
  6. 2024CityWalker: Learning Embodied Urban Navigation from Web-Scale Videoscited by 41
  7. 2025OmniVLA: An Omni-Modal Vision-Language-Action Model for Robot Navigationcited by 38
  8. 2025NaviDiffusor: Cost-Guided Diffusion Model for Visual Navigationcited by 25
  9. 2025Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Modelscited by 25
  10. 2026ABot-N0: Technical Report on the VLA Foundation Model for Versatile Embodied Navigationcited by 25
  11. 2025A Survey of Interactive Generative Videocited by 23
  12. 2025XR-1: Towards Versatile Vision-Language-Action Models via Learning Unified Vision-Motion Representationscited by 15
38 more
  1. 2025Towards Unified World Models for Visual Navigation via Memory-Augmented Planning and Foresightcited by 14
  2. 2025Learning to Drive Anywhere with Model-Based Reannotationcited by 13
  3. 2024FlowNav: Combining Flow Matching and Depth Priors for Efficient Navigationcited by 12
  4. 2025SocialNav: Training Human-Inspired Foundation Model for Socially-Aware Embodied Navigationcited by 12
  5. 2023PlaceNav: Topological Navigation through Place Recognitioncited by 11
  6. 2025SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigationcited by 10
  7. 2026Sparse Video Generation Propels Real-World Beyond-the-View Vision-Language Navigationcited by 10
  8. 2026AsyncVLA: An Asynchronous VLA for Fast and Robust Navigation on the Edgecited by 10
  9. 2026Language-Conditioned World Modeling for Visual Navigationcited by 10
  10. 2024HEIGHT: Heterogeneous Interaction Graph Transformer for Robot Navigation in Crowded and Constrained Environmentscited by 9
  11. 2025LookOut: Real-World Humanoid Egocentric Navigationcited by 9
  12. 2026RAE-NWM: Navigation World Model in Dense Visual Representation Spacecited by 9
  13. 2024SELFI: Autonomous Self-Improvement with Reinforcement Learning for Social Navigationcited by 8
  14. 2025CitySeeker: How Do VLMS Explore Embodied Urban Navigation With Implicit Human Needs?cited by 8
  15. 2026NavWAM: A Navigation World Action Model for Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigationcited by 8
  16. 2024Exploring 3D Human Pose Estimation and Forecasting from the Robot's Perspective: The HARPER Datasetcited by 6
  17. 2024GSON: A Group-based Social Navigation Framework with Large Multimodal Modelcited by 6
  18. 2025UrbanNav: Learning Language-Guided Urban Navigation from Web-Scale Human Trajectoriescited by 6
  19. 2026Planning in 8 Tokens: A Compact Discrete Tokenizer for Latent World Modelcited by 6
  20. 2026From Obstacles to Etiquette: Robot Social Navigation with VLM-Informed Path Selectioncited by 5
  21. 2026NavWM: A Unified Navigation World Model for Foresight-Driven Planningcited by 5
  22. 2024Arena 4.0: A Comprehensive ROS2 Development and Benchmarking Platform for Human-centric Navigation Using Generative-Model-based Environment Generationcited by 4
  23. 2025GrndCtrl: Grounding World Models via Self-Supervised Reward Alignmentcited by 4
  24. 2025MetricNet: Recovering Metric Scale in Generative Navigation Policiescited by 3
  25. 2025MM-Nav: Multi-View VLA Model for Robust Visual Navigation via Multi-Expert Learningcited by 3
  26. 2025EgoCogNav: Cognition-aware Human Egocentric Navigationcited by 3
  27. 2026NavOL: Navigation Policy with Online Imitation Learningcited by 3
  28. 2026World Models as Group Actionscited by 3
  29. 2026Pondering the Way: Spatial-perceiving World Action Model for Embodied Navigationcited by 3
  30. 2025Ratatouille: Imitation Learning Ingredients for Real-world Social Robot Navigationcited by 2
  31. 2025Target-Bench: Can Video World Models Achieve Mapless Path Planning with Semantic Targets?cited by 2
  32. 2026STRNet: Visual Navigation with Spatio-Temporal Representation through Dynamic Graph Aggregationcited by 2
  33. 2026Drift-Resistant Navigation World Model with Anchored Epipolar Guidancecited by 2
  34. 2025Synthetic vs. Real Training Data for Visual Navigationcited by 1
  35. 2024LocoVR: Multiuser Indoor Locomotion Dataset in Virtual Realitycited by 0
  36. 2025PIG-Nav: Key Insights for Pretrained Image Goal Navigation Modelscited by 0
  37. 2025DynaNav: Dynamic Feature and Layer Selection for Efficient Visual Navigationcited by 0
  38. 2026RVN-Bench: A Benchmark for Reactive Visual Navigationcited by 0

50 most cited of 61 All 61 (JSON)