Proactive Physical AI through Continuous Observation and Timely Intervention
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 11523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When should an intelligent assistant speak up without being asked?
When should an intelligent assistant speak up without being asked? Continuous egocentric video offers rich, evolving context that enables a new form of assistance: one that is proactive rather than merely reactive.
The paper introduces “P…IBench”, a benchmark for proactive video understanding that tests daily perception, risk prediction, and intervention in real‑life streaming scenarios. It evaluates 12 video‑language models, finding that current systems struggle to make well‑calibrated response decisions. The authors also create new proactive training data and train “P…I-Assistant-4B”, which shows uneven improvements across the benchmark’s capabilities.
Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations.