Social-spatial dependencies for learning visual navigation

2026-07-08

AI Summary

This study addresses the limitation of traditional visual navigation approaches, which often neglect the influence of social structures and spatial interactions on individual behavioral strategies within groups. The authors propose a bottom-up modeling framework that integrates deep reinforcement learning with multi-agent simulation to train agents in non-stationary dynamic environments, thereby investigating how task objectives and socio-spatial factors jointly shape the evolution of navigation strategies. Their findings demonstrate that high-quality social information can induce strategic phase transitions, successfully reproducing behavioral shifts ranging from individual navigation and group following to crowd-aware obstacle avoidance. These results underscore the decisive role of socio-spatial dependencies in strategy formation and challenge conventional paradigms that focus exclusively on individual-level behavior.

Abstract

Navigation for social organisms rarely is a fully independent activity. Group structure and dynamics, as well as embodied interactions, critically influence useful behavior. Individual neural network controlled agents are trained to navigate in different social contexts, where social dependence and behavioral strategy learned is determined by relative task performance and spatial effect. Increasing high quality social information drives phase transitions from individual to following navigational strategy, and to collision avoidance in response to a crowded foraging patch. Predictable, nonstationary environmental dynamics drive behavioral hybridization between individual and social navigation, far and near the patch. Our findings challenge the approach of only inspecting individual behavior for social organisms and highlight the importance of taking a bottom-up approach in understanding how organisms behave.

Problem

• social-spatial dependencies
• visual navigation
• social organisms
• behavioral strategy
• environmental dynamics

Innovation

• social-spatial dependencies
• visual navigation
• phase transitions
• behavioral hybridization
• nonstationary dynamics