arxivcs.RO2026-07-22
SOPD-SocialNav: Selective On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Social Navigation
Xinyu Zhang, Zishuo Wang, Ling Xiao
Vision-language models have shown strong potential for social robot navigation by leveraging rich semantic understanding of complex environments and human behaviors. However, large scale VLMs are difficult to deploy on resource-constrained robotic platforms, while lightweight VLM…