arXiv AI

Toward Personal Intelligence Through Cooperative Observation

The paper proposes a framework called cooperative observation for personal AI systems, arguing that the system’s ability to model a user’s goals and constraints is limited by what it can observe. It emphasizes that merely increasing observation does not improve assistance; instead, the system must selectively compress information for the task at hand. The authors describe a feedback loop where the system’s usefulness, user trust, and consent shape future observation, and present a preliminary single‑subject study with a prototype called Organizm.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

AI Should Not Only Be Helpful. It Should Be Contingent. Artificial Intimacy, Sycophancy, and the Future of Social Learning

The article argues that conversational AI should provide contingent feedback—responses that vary with user behavior and its social consequences—rather than merely seeking user approval and fluency. It highlights how current alignment methods, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, often produce sycophantic, noncontingent affirmation, which can hinder the development of interpersonal skills, especially in adolescents. The authors propose a framework for evaluating and designing contingent AI, incorporating trajectory-based assessment and social consequence prediction, and call for interdisciplinary research to ensure AI systems positively influence human social learning.

By Scott Compton, Arjun Nagendran
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Strategic Advice in the Age of Personal AI

The paper examines how advisors should tailor recommendations when users consult personal AI assistants whose advice is predictable. It models the influence of personal AI through consultation probability and relative trust, finding that optimal counteraction and loss are hump‑shaped in these dimensions. The study also explores partial predictability, costly adjustments, richer information structures, and presents an online experiment showing participants weigh advisor, personal AI, and their own judgments differently.

By Yueyang Liu, Wichinpong Park Sinchaisri
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Training Proactive and Personalized LLM Agents

The paper proposes shifting AI agent training from isolated task completion to collaborative interaction, defining three key dimensions—Productivity, Proactivity, and Personalization (PPP). It introduces UserVille, an environment with LLM-based user simulators and user-centric feedback, and a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that optimizes PPP using rewards from task outcomes, question effort, and preference adherence. Experiments on SWE-Bench and BrowseComp-Plus show PPP-trained agents outperform strong LLM baselines, ask more targeted questions, and generalize to unseen preferences and tasks, with a user study underscoring the value of user-centric feedback for effective, supervised collaboration.

By Weiwei Sun, Xuhui Zhou, Weihua Du, Xingyao Wang, Sean Welleck, Graham Neubig, Maarten Sap, Yiming Yang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

PersonaMem-v3: Toward Omni-Platform Personal Intelligence for Holistic User Understanding, Recommendation, and Agentic Tasks

PersonaMem-v3 is a benchmark and evaluation harness designed to assess omni-platform personal intelligence for AI agents. It is built from over one million anonymized real-world engagement histories, covering social media, chatbots, calendars, and AI companions, and tracks user preferences and habits over time. The benchmark tests agents on personalization, LLM-powered recommendation, proactiveness, agentic tool use, and geo-temporal reasoning, evaluating their ability to infer holistic user understanding, personalize responses, rerank recommendations, follow user steering, and avoid inappropriate personalization.

By Bowen Jiang, Yuan Yuan, Zhuoqun Hao, Yuchen Liu, Maohao Shen, Sihao Chen, Gregory Wornell, Chris Callison-Burch, Lyle Ungar, Dan Roth, Qi Guo, Xiangjun Fan, Camillo J. Taylor, Hanchao Yu
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Humans' ALMANAC: A Human Collaboration Dataset of Action-Level Mental Model Annotations for Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606. 06388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in LLM agents have enabled complex cognitive capabilities, such as multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use, that increasingly position these agents as human collaborators.

By Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Jiayi Su, Chaoran Chen, Songlin Xiao, Zheng Zhang, Yun Wang, Yunyao Li, Jian Zhao, Tongshuang Wu, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Dakuo Wang, Bingsheng Yao
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Robots That Take Initiative: A Framework for Building and Evaluating Proactive Robots

The paper presents a unified formalism for proactive robot assistance, organized into three levels, and introduces a framework for unprompted proactive assistance. It demonstrates that offline evaluation overestimates performance and proposes a closed-loop evaluation using an adaptive human model. The authors also present GAP, a method that learns from passive observation to anticipate user goals and act, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods in closed-loop tests.

By Maithili Patel, Sonia Chernova
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Value-Sensitive Delegation in Everyday AI Agent Use: Evidence from OpenClaw

The paper examines how users delegate tasks to the AI agent OpenClaw by analyzing 73,093 Reddit posts. It identifies 21 human values grouped into six categories—such as Autonomous Operation, Dependable Operation, Affordable Operation, Bounded Reach, Reviewability, and Equitable Access—and finds that values are largely satisfied when users describe the agent’s outputs but often unmet when users discuss supervising the agent. The authors term this pattern "value‑sensitive delegation," emphasizing that supporting human values requires attention to both what an agent does and the conditions users set around its use.

By Renkai Ma, Ruyuan Wan, Xuan Lu, Fan Yang, Chen Chen, Lingyao Li
arXiv AI
Aug 12

ComBodied Agents: a New Paradigm of Human-Centric Agentic AI

arXiv:2608. 10915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: After an older adult misses a medication dose, a software agent can send another reminder and an embodied agent can bring the medication.

By Qianggang Ding, Xingyao Wang, Rui Feng, Zhibin Wang, Feixiang Wang, Kelong Mao, Hao Sun, Zhiyao Luo, Jiankai Tang, Lei Li, Jiadong Guo, Minheng Ni, Weicong Lin, Chenxi Yang, Hongxiang Gao, Zhenghua Chen, Yang Bai, Min Wu, Jun Cheng, Huazhu Fu, Dacheng Tao, Bang Liu