arXiv Machine Learning

Infer Human's Intentions Before Following Natural Language Instructions

The paper introduces FISER, a framework that explicitly infers human goals and intentions before planning actions for AI agents to follow natural language instructions in collaborative embodied tasks. It employs Transformer-based models and is evaluated on the HandMeThat benchmark, outperforming end-to-end approaches and strong baselines such as Chain of Thought prompting. FISER achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on this embodied social reasoning task.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Inferring the Unspoken: Aligning Embodied Agents with Implicit Preferences

The paper "Inferring the Unspoken: Aligning Embodied Agents with Implicit Preferences" addresses the challenge of natural-language instructions that omit details needed for embodied action. It introduces the Preference-based Planning (PbP) benchmark, comprising 5,000 evaluation groups and 290 preferences across three levels, to systematically evaluate agents’ ability to infer latent user preferences from a few demonstrations. The authors propose the two-stage Inferring the Unspoken (InTU) framework, which first verbalizes inferred preferences from multimodal demonstrations and then generates action plans conditioned on that explicit representation, showing that explicit verbalization improves alignment and robustness compared to direct end-to-end planning.

By Manjie Xu, Xinyi Yang, Wei Liang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

STEP: State-Aware Task Estimation and Planning with Multi-Modal LLMs for Human-Robot Collaboration

The paper introduces STEP, a State‑Aware Task Estimator and Planner that uses multi‑modal large language models to explicitly estimate system states and predict state transitions during task planning. By forecasting future states alongside actions, STEP reduces hallucinated actions and improves task‑convergent planning. In a simulated robot assembly task, STEP outperforms the state‑of‑the‑art by 32.8% in action executability and 14.8% in final‑state error.

By Maitrey Gramopadhye, Prakash Baskaran, Xiao Liu, Songpo Li, Soshi Iba
arXiv AI
Jun 29

NormAct: A Benchmark for Hidden Social Norm Compliance in Embodied Planning

arXiv:2606. 27826v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as embodied planners in egocentric environments, where task success requires not only achieving instructed goals but also acting in socially appropriate ways.

By Shiyun Zhao, Xinwei Song, Tianyu Guo, Xiaomeng Gao, Mingyuan Liu, Xu Han, Yuanyuan Zhang, Zhenliang Zhang, Xue Feng, Bo Dai
arXiv AI
Jul 16

UESF-Bench: Benchmarking and Probing for Unified Embodied Seeking and Following

arXiv:2607. 13621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-guided human following is an important capability for embodied agents, but existing benchmarks typically assume that the target person is visible at the start of an episode.

By Kun Yu, Jianhua Yang, Yixiang Chen, Changwei Wang, Hongyuan Yu, Yan Huang, Fushuo Huo, Ya Jing, Zhumin Chen, Keji He
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

ProAct: Harnessing Streaming Motion Generation and Agentic Reasoning for Real-Time Embodied Social Interaction

ProAct is a dual‑system framework for real‑time embodied social interaction that separates a low‑latency Behavioral System, which streams multimodal interaction and generates continuous non‑verbal motion, from a slower Cognitive System that performs long‑horizon social reasoning and produces proactive intentions. The Cognitive System uses an efficient memory mechanism and a user‑motivation prediction module to decide when to intervene, while the Behavioral System translates these intentions into fluid motion via an intention‑conditioned streaming flow‑matching generator with a disentangled ControlNet branch. The framework is deployed on a physical humanoid robot and validated through real‑world user studies, motion‑generation benchmarks, and a new ProActBench benchmark for proactive trigger detection and restraint.

By Zeyi Zhang, Zixi Kang, Ruijie Zhao, Yusen Feng, Biao Jiang, Hanyu Ji, Libin Liu
arXiv AI
Jul 28

Unified Embodied VLM Reasoning with Robotic Action via Autoregressive Discretized Pre-training

arXiv:2512. 24125v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robotic systems operating in open-world environments must achieve both broad generalization and high-precision action execution, a combination that remains challenging for existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

By Yi Liu, Sukai Wang, Dafeng Wei, Xiaowei Cai, Linqing Zhong, Jiange Yang, Guanghui Ren, Jinyu Zhang, Maoqing Yao, Chuankang Li, Xindong He, Liliang Chen, Jianlan Luo
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Iron: Intent-Aligned and Retrospective Dual Learning Framework for Enhancing Generalist Virtual Agents

Iron is a new framework for training generalist virtual agents that aligns low‑level actions with high‑level intents using a stepwise cycle‑consistent reward. It also repurposes failed trajectories through a hindsight reproduction mechanism to improve learning efficiency and task diversity. Experiments show Iron‑trained agents outperform those trained with three times more data, achieving a 25.06% relative improvement on unseen web tasks and better performance on complex tasks.

By Jiahe Ying, Wendong Bu, Kaihang Pan, Bingchen Miao, Siyu Chen, Wen Wang, Xueming Jiang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang