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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Jialian, Cao, Yuchen, Liu, Junhong, Guo, Weiran, Wang, Xutao, Song, Jiaming, Zhang, Jiahao, Chen, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11484
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Table of Contents:
  • Task completion in digital and physical environments increasingly involves complex temporal interaction, where actions and observations unfold over different time scales rather than align with fixed observation--action steps. To model such interactions, we propose \emph{Engagement Process} (EP), an interaction formalism that inherits the decision-theoretic structure of POMDPs while making time explicit in the action--observation interface. EP represents actions and observations as decoupled event streams along time, rather than updates paired at fixed decision steps. This interface captures single-agent timing issues such as deliberation latency, delayed feedback, and persistent actions, while supporting richer agent-side organization, multi-rate coordination, and compositional interaction among subsystems. Across toy, LLM-agent, and learning experiments, EP exposes temporal behaviors hidden by step-based interfaces and enables policies to adapt under explicit time costs.