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
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.
arXiv:2606. 04970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach.
By Kaustav Kundu, Ritvik Shrivastava, Maxim Arap, Nanshu Wang, Xianhui Zhu, Quintin Fettes, Gautam Tiwari, Parth Suresh, Th\'eo Moutakanni, Alejandro Castillejo Munoz, Allen Bolourchi, Pascale Fung, Pinar Donmez, Babak Damavandi, Anuj Kumar, Seungwhan Moon
arXiv:2607. 23784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While vision-language-action models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot manipulation capabilities, they remain fundamentally black box policies that are difficult to interpret, adapt, or correct when they inevitably fail.
By Daphne Chen, Archit Ritesh Jain, Eric Goossen, Emma Romig, Michael Murray, Nick Walker, Maya Cakmak
Long-term physical coexistence with intelligent robots requires more than capable robot policies. A persistent robotic assistant must support diverse user-facing interfaces, maintain long-horizon memory of people and preferences, coordinate across robot embodiments, and translate human intent into safe physical execution.
The paper introduces a ROS-Agent architecture that enhances task reliability and execution efficiency for open‑source LLM‑powered robotic agents. It adds a MetaTool that forces the LLM to produce a structured pseudo‑code plan before any action, storing this plan in a scratchpad to separate planning from execution. Experiments on a custom mobile robot show up to ~24% improvement in complex task completion and contextual consistency compared to the baseline.
By Kazi Abrar Mahmud, Nilotpaul Kundu Dhurubo, Tamal Kirttonia, Sabbir Hossain Ujjal, Mohammad Ariful Haque