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Main Authors: Chen, Junting, Li, Yunchuan, Jiang, Panfeng, Du, Jiacheng, Chen, Zixuan, Tie, Chenrui, Deng, Jiajun, Shao, Lin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09920
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author Chen, Junting
Li, Yunchuan
Jiang, Panfeng
Du, Jiacheng
Chen, Zixuan
Tie, Chenrui
Deng, Jiajun
Shao, Lin
author_facet Chen, Junting
Li, Yunchuan
Jiang, Panfeng
Du, Jiacheng
Chen, Zixuan
Tie, Chenrui
Deng, Jiajun
Shao, Lin
contents Towards human-robot coexistence, socially aware navigation is significant for mobile robots. Yet existing studies on this area focus mainly on path efficiency and pedestrian collision avoidance, which are essential but represent only a fraction of social navigation. Beyond these basics, robots must also comply with user instructions, aligning their actions to task goals and social norms expressed by humans. In this work, we present LISN-Bench, the first simulation-based benchmark for language-instructed social navigation. Built on Rosnav-Arena 3.0, it is the first standardized social navigation benchmark to incorporate instruction following and scene understanding across diverse contexts. To address this task, we further propose Social-Nav-Modulator, a fast-slow hierarchical system where a VLM agent modulates costmaps and controller parameters. Decoupling low-level action generation from the slower VLM loop reduces reliance on high-frequency VLM inference while improving dynamic avoidance and perception adaptability. Our method achieves an average success rate of 91.3%, which is greater than 63% than the most competitive baseline, with most of the improvements observed in challenging tasks such as following a person in a crowd and navigating while strictly avoiding instruction-forbidden regions. The project website is at: https://social-nav.github.io/LISN-project/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_09920
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LISN: Language-Instructed Social Navigation with VLM-based Controller Modulating
Chen, Junting
Li, Yunchuan
Jiang, Panfeng
Du, Jiacheng
Chen, Zixuan
Tie, Chenrui
Deng, Jiajun
Shao, Lin
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.9
Towards human-robot coexistence, socially aware navigation is significant for mobile robots. Yet existing studies on this area focus mainly on path efficiency and pedestrian collision avoidance, which are essential but represent only a fraction of social navigation. Beyond these basics, robots must also comply with user instructions, aligning their actions to task goals and social norms expressed by humans. In this work, we present LISN-Bench, the first simulation-based benchmark for language-instructed social navigation. Built on Rosnav-Arena 3.0, it is the first standardized social navigation benchmark to incorporate instruction following and scene understanding across diverse contexts. To address this task, we further propose Social-Nav-Modulator, a fast-slow hierarchical system where a VLM agent modulates costmaps and controller parameters. Decoupling low-level action generation from the slower VLM loop reduces reliance on high-frequency VLM inference while improving dynamic avoidance and perception adaptability. Our method achieves an average success rate of 91.3%, which is greater than 63% than the most competitive baseline, with most of the improvements observed in challenging tasks such as following a person in a crowd and navigating while strictly avoiding instruction-forbidden regions. The project website is at: https://social-nav.github.io/LISN-project/
title LISN: Language-Instructed Social Navigation with VLM-based Controller Modulating
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.9
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09920