What do we really need for social navigation?🤖 Deep RL? No❌ Imitation learning? No❌ LLMs? No❌ 📊Turns out for over 80% of the time, classical methods >> learning-based solutions! In new work, we rethink social navigation. Thread🧶

In typical day-to-day life, you only need to maneuver around other humans in doorways, hallways, intersections about a **fraction** of the time. For the rest, you can "switch off your brain" and just walk straight.

But for that tiny fraction where you do need to socially adapt to the situation, classical systems are insufficient. There, you need the representation power of learning methods. so what do you do? just combine the two, and switch between them depending on the situation !

We design a new hybrid approach that "targets" the learning only to situations where its needed, defaulting to classical otherwise. It performs better than if using classical or learning alone.

📰Preprint: 📽️video: Joint with @_amirraj , Zichao Hu , @KarnanHaresh , Amirreza Payande , Luisa Mao , @PeterStone_TX , @Joydeepb_robots , and @XuesuXiao @texas_robotics @utlarg @amrl_ut

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