HA-VLN 2.0: An Open Benchmark and Leaderboard for Human-Aware Navigation in Discrete and Continuous Environments with Dynamic Multi-Human Interactions

Title:HA-VLN 2.0: An Open Benchmark and Leaderboard for Human-Aware Navigation in Discrete and Continuous Environments with Dynamic Multi-Human Interactions

Abstract:Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has been studied mainly in either discrete or continuous spaces, with little attention to dynamic, crowded environments. We present HA-VLN 2.0, a unified benchmark introducing explicit social-awareness constraints. Our contributions are: (i) a standardized task and metrics capturing both goal accuracy and personal-space adherence; (ii) HAPS 2.0 dataset and simulators modeling multi-human interactions, outdoor contexts, and finer language-motion alignment; (iii) benchmarks on 16,844 socially grounded instructions, revealing sharp performance drops of leading agents under human dynamics and partial observability; and (iv) real-world robot experiments validating sim-to-real transfer, with an open leaderboard enabling transparent comparison. Results show that explicit social modeling improves navigation robustness and reduces collisions, underscoring necessity of human-centric approaches. By releasing datasets, simulators, baselines, and protocols, HA-VLN 2.0 provides a strong foundation for safe, human-aware navigation research.

Accepted to IROS 2026. 35 pages, 20 figures, website: this https URL

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2503.14229 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2503.14229v5 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.14229 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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