ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

HA-VLN 2.0: Open Benchmark for Human-Aware Navigation in Dynamic Environments

ai-technology · 2026-08-19

HA-VLN 2.0 establishes a comprehensive benchmark for Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) by incorporating specific social-awareness constraints to enhance navigation in both discrete and continuous environments. This benchmark features a standardized task along with metrics that evaluate goal accuracy and respect for personal space. It comprises the HAPS 2.0 dataset and simulators that replicate multi-human interactions, outdoor settings, and precise language-motion coordination. Analysis of 16,844 socially grounded instructions indicates significant performance declines for top agents when faced with human dynamics and partial observability. Experiments with real-world robots confirm the effectiveness of sim-to-real transfer, and an open leaderboard facilitates transparent evaluations. Findings highlight that explicit social modeling enhances navigation resilience and minimizes collisions, emphasizing the importance of human-centric strategies. The project is available on arXiv.

Key facts

  • HA-VLN 2.0 introduces explicit social-awareness constraints to VLN.
  • The benchmark covers discrete and continuous environments with dynamic multi-human interactions.
  • HAPS 2.0 dataset and simulators model multi-human interactions and outdoor contexts.
  • Benchmarks were run on 16,844 socially grounded instructions.
  • Leading agents show sharp performance drops under human dynamics and partial observability.
  • Real-world robot experiments validated sim-to-real transfer.
  • An open leaderboard enables transparent comparison of methods.
  • Explicit social modeling improves navigation robustness and reduces collisions.

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