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 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 (CoT) and Claude (CoT), our model achieves cleaner action sets (higher APG: 0.595 vs 0.013/0.013), more reliable ranking (higher MAA: 3.571 vs 0.057/0.095), and lower error rates (0.264 vs 0.692/0.649), while maintaining real-time efficiency (1.524 FPS, over 3× faster).