Title: EnvSocial-Diff: A Diffusion-Based Crowd Simulation Model with Environmental Conditioning and Individual- Group Interaction
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Crowd simulation, Social physics force, Diffusion model

Abstract: Modeling realistic pedestrian trajectories requires accounting for both social interactions and environmental context, yet most existing approaches largely emphasize social dynamics. We propose EnvSocial-Diff: a diffusion-based crowd simulation model informed by social physics and augmented with environmental conditioning and individual–group interaction. Our structured environmental conditioning module explicitly encodes obstacles, objects of interest, and lighting levels, providing interpretable signals that capture scene constraints and attractors. In parallel, the individual–group interaction module goes beyond individual-level modeling by capturing both fine-grained interpersonal relations and group-level conformity through a graph-based design. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that EnvSocial-Diff outperforms the latest state-of-the-art methods, underscoring the importance of explicit environmental conditioning and multi-level social interaction for realistic crowd simulation.