SoGuDiff: Socially Guided Diffusion for Steerable, Norm-Grounded Robot Navigation

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Beyond collision avoidance, socially competent robot navigation requires adherence to implicit social conventions that vary across contexts, cultures, and deployment requirements. Many conventional navigation policies learn a single normative behavior, either through reinforcement learning against a fixed reward function or imitation of human demonstrations, exposing no interface for adjusting that conduct at runtime. We present a diffusion-based navigation framework whose social behavior can be tuned at deployment: a desired style is specified, such as how closely the robot passes, which side it yields to, or how much it defers to groups, and the planner adapts accordingly. Continuous style axes can be followed independently or composed, spanning a behavioral space rather than discrete, primitive-based specifications. A feasibility projection layer separates learned social behavior from kinematic feasibility and collision avoidance. A single-axis sweep illustrates a tradeoff curve that strictly dominates the evaluated fixed-behavior baseline configurations, and stylistic differences are replicated in real-world demonstrations.