Act on What You See: Unlocking Safe Social Navigation in Vision-Language-Action Models
Safe social navigation requires robots to distinguish people from ordinary obstacles and to react before danger becomes imminent. We show that pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models already encode pedestrian-object distinctions and future collision signals in their internal representations, but behavior cloning fails to translate these signals into socially appropriate actions. To address this mismatch, we propose SALSA, a two-stage annotation-free post-training framework: (1) social behavioral alignment bridges intermediate-layer social features to the action head and trains on counterfactual human-object scene pairs to break visual saliency shortcuts; (2) temporal safety alignment provides automatically generated future-risk supervision to enable anticipatory collision avoidance. On SCAND and real-world deployment, SALSA reduces near-collisions by 86.4% and improves social counterfactual accuracy from 53% to 93%, demonstrating that safer social navigation can be achieved by teaching VLA policies to act on representations they already possess. These results show that pretrained VLA policies can be adapted for safer social navigation by better aligning their latent representations with action generation.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Collision AvoidanceSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Socially Aware Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to hu…
Autonomous NavigationDeep Reinforcement LearningMotion PlanningNavigate+3SONG: A Photorealistic 3D Gaussian Simulation Platform for Benchmarking Social Navigation
Social navigation has progressed from simplified 2D environments toward a more general vision-based setting, in which a robot needs to achieve socially compliant behavior purely from onboard visual observations. Yet supp…
SocialNav-MoE: A Mixture-of-Experts Vision Language Model for Socially Compliant Navigation with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
For robots navigating in human-populated environments, safety and social compliance are equally critical, yet prior work has mostly emphasized safety. Socially compliant navigation that accounts for human comfort, social…
Semantic SimilarityWalk With Me: Long-Horizon Social Navigation for Human-Centric Outdoor Assistance
Assisting humans in open-world outdoor environments requires robots to translate high-level natural-language intentions into safe, long-horizon, and socially compliant navigation behavior. Existing map-based methods rely…
MAction-SocialNav: Multi-Action Socially Compliant Navigation via Reasoning-enhanced Prompt Tuning
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 acti…
Robot Navigation