# Towards Generalizable Safety in Crowd Navigation via Conformal Uncertainty Handling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05634 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05634/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL for robot navigation and UAV control, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 44 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for robot navigation and UAV control](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-robot-navigation-and-uav-control/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [Adaptive Conformal Inference Under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00170/) (2021)
- [Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08835/) (2018)
- [Conformal Inference for Online Prediction with Arbitrary Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08401/) (2022)
- [Safe Planning in Dynamic Environments using Conformal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10254/) (2022)
- [Decentralized Non-communicating Multiagent Collision Avoidance with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07845/) (2016)
- [Core Challenges of Social Robot Navigation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05668/) (2021)
- [What the Constant Velocity Model Can Teach Us About Pedestrian Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07933/) (2019)
- [OmniSafe: An Infrastructure for Accelerating Safe Reinforcement Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09304/) (2023)
- [LOKI: Long Term and Key Intentions for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08236/) (2021)
- [Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16740/) (2023)
- [Intention Aware Robot Crowd Navigation with Attention-Based Interaction Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01821/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Conformal Prediction for Motion Planning among Dynamic Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00278/) (2022)
- [Decentralized Structural-RNN for Robot Crowd Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04820/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving with Latent State Inference and Spatial-Temporal Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04251/) (2020)
- [DRL-VO: Learning to Navigate Through Crowded Dynamic Scenes Using Velocity Obstacles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06512/) (2023)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Dual-Attention Network for Multi-Agent Prediction and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09117/) (2021)
- [UniOcc: A Unified Benchmark for Occupancy Forecasting and Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24381/) (2025)
- [CMP: Cooperative Motion Prediction with Multi-Agent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17916/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent Dynamic Relational Reasoning for Social Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12275/) (2024)
- [DR-SPAAM: A Spatial-Attention and Auto-regressive Model for Person Detection in 2D Range Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14079/) (2020)
- [Grouptron: Dynamic Multi-Scale Graph Convolutional Networks for Group-Aware Dense Crowd Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14128/) (2021)
- [Safe Perception-Based Control under Stochastic Sensor Uncertainty using Conformal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00194/) (2023)
- [Interaction Modeling with Multiplex Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10660/) (2022)
- [Conformal Predictive Safety Filter for RL Controllers in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02551/) (2023)
- [Scene Informer: Anchor-based Occlusion Inference and Trajectory Prediction in Partially Observable Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13893/) (2023)
- [SICNav: Safe and Interactive Crowd Navigation using Model Predictive Control and Bilevel Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10982/) (2023)
- [Pedestrian Crossing Action Recognition and Trajectory Prediction with 3D Human Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01075/) (2023)
- [Learning Sparse Interaction Graphs of Partially Detected Pedestrians for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07056/) (2021)

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

- [MM-Nav: Multi-View VLA Model for Robust Visual Navigation via Multi-Expert Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03142/) (2025)
- [CommCP: Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination via LLM-Based Communication with Conformal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06038/) (2026)
- [DiffCVaR: Reinforcement Learning for Risk Adaptation via Differentiable CVaR Barrier Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21257/) (2026)
- [CoCoNav: Conformal Control for Safe Robot Navigation in Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07751/) (2026)
- [Navigating the Proximity-Safety Balance: Constraint Decomposition for Human Following in Pedestrian Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10056/) (2026)
- [Diffusion Policies for Short-Horizon Planning in Robot Crowd Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27158/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mobile robots navigating in crowds trained using reinforcement learning are known to suffer performance degradation when faced with out-of-distribution scenarios. We propose that by properly accounting for the uncertainties of pedestrians, a robot can learn safe navigation policies that are robust to distribution shifts. Our method augments agent observations with prediction uncertainty estimates generated by adaptive conformal inference, and it uses these estimates to guide the agent's behavior through constrained reinforcement learning. The system helps regulate the agent's actions and enables it to adapt to distribution shifts. In the in-distribution setting, our approach achieves a 96.93% success rate, which is over 8.80% higher than the previous state-of-the-art baselines with over 3.72 times fewer collisions and 2.43 times fewer intrusions into ground-truth human future trajectories. In three out-of-distribution scenarios, our method shows much stronger robustness when facing distribution shifts in velocity variations, policy changes, and transitions from individual to group dynamics. We deploy our method on a real robot, and experiments show that the robot makes safe and robust decisions when interacting with both sparse and dense crowds. Our code and videos are available on https://gen-safe-nav.github.io/.