# MAction-SocialNav: Multi-Action Socially Compliant Navigation via Reasoning-enhanced Prompt Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21722 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21722/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 3 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [Textbooks Are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11644/) (2023)
- [SocialNav-MoE: A Mixture-of-Experts Vision Language Model for Socially Compliant Navigation with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14757/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Probing Prompt Design for Socially Compliant Robot Navigation with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14622/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Lightweight Vision Language Models through Group Competitive Learning for Socially Compliant Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11447/) (2026)
- [HumAIN: Human-Aware Implicit Social Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07357/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Socially compliant navigation requires robots to move safely and appropriately in human-centered environments by respecting social norms. However, social norms are often ambiguous, and in a single scenario, multiple actions may be equally acceptable. Most existing methods simplify this problem by assuming a single correct action, which limits their ability to handle real-world social uncertainty. In this work, we propose MAction-SocialNav, an efficient vision language model for socially compliant navigation that explicitly addresses action ambiguity, enabling generating multiple plausible actions within one scenario. To enhance the model's reasoning capability, we introduce a novel meta-cognitive prompt (MCP) method. Furthermore, to evaluate the proposed method, we curate a multi-action socially compliant navigation dataset that accounts for diverse conditions, including crowd density, indoor and outdoor environments, and dual human annotations. The dataset contains 789 samples, each with three-turn conversation, split into 710 training samples and 79 test samples through random selection. We also design five evaluation metrics to assess high-level decision precision, safety, and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MAction-SocialNav achieves strong social reasoning performance while maintaining high efficiency, highlighting its potential for real-world human robot navigation. Compared with zero-shot GPT-4o and Claude, our model achieves substantially higher decision quality (APG: 0.595 vs. 0.000/0.025) and safety alignment (ER: 0.264 vs. 0.642/0.668), while maintaining real-time efficiency (1.524 FPS, over 3x faster).