Zihuan Zhang | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

NormGym: Evaluating Normative Competence through Social Interaction

Normative competence, the ability to infer socially enforced expectations from interaction and adjust behavior accordingly, is essential for agents operating in unfamiliar human communities. Yet existing evaluations largely test whether agents can recognize or apply norms they may already know, rather than whether they can acquire previously unknown norms from social interaction. We introduce NormGym, an interactive benchmark for normative competence in which a newcomer must infer a hidden, arbitrary norm while pursuing its own task in a multi-agent community. Success requires distinguishing what is possible from what is permitted, inferring the norm from observed behavior and sanctions, and applying it in new situations. NormGym contains diverse norms and distinct environments, allowing systematic evaluation of current agents, including large language model (LLM) agents. We find that normative competence remains challenging: the strongest evaluated LLM achieves a joint task-and-compliance success rate of 55.3%. Our analysis reveals that models can sometimes revise their behavior following sanctions for their own actions, but struggle to use other agents' behavior and the sanctions they receive to infer the underlying norm. We further find that fine-tuning models may be insufficient to improve normative competence. These results suggest that current models lack a robust, transferable capability for acquiring normative knowledge through social interaction.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

ColorDynamic: Generalizable, Scalable, Real-time, End-to-end Local Planner for Unstructured and Dynamic Environments

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has demonstrated potential in addressing robotic local planning problems, yet its efficacy remains constrained in highly unstructured and dynamic environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes the ColorDynamic framework. First, an end-to-end DRL formulation is established, which maps raw sensor data directly to control commands, thereby ensuring compatibility with unstructured environments. Under this formulation, a novel network, Transqer, is introduced. The Transqer enables online DRL learning from temporal transitions, substantially enhancing decision-making in dynamic scenarios. To facilitate scalable training of Transqer with diverse data, an efficient simulation platform E-Sparrow, along with a data augmentation technique leveraging symmetric invariance, are developed. Comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art methods, alongside assessments of generalizability, scalability, and real-time performance, were conducted to validate the effectiveness of ColorDynamic. Results indicate that our approach achieves a success rate exceeding 90% while exhibiting real-time capacity (1.2-1.3 ms per planning). Additionally, ablation studies were performed to corroborate the contributions of individual components. Building on this, the OkayPlan-ColorDynamic (OPCD) navigation system is presented, with simulated and real-world experiments demonstrating its superiority and applicability in complex scenarios. The codebase and experimental demonstrations have been open-sourced on our website to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

cs.RO↗