PACT: Proactive Asking for Continual Task Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: He, Chengbo, Li, Sheng, Ma, Chenyang, Zou, Bochao, Sun, Li, Chen, Jiansheng, Xing, Junliang, Shi, Yuanchun, Ma, Huimin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author He, Chengbo
Li, Sheng
Ma, Chenyang
Zou, Bochao
Sun, Li
Chen, Jiansheng
Xing, Junliang
Shi, Yuanchun
Ma, Huimin
author_facet He, Chengbo
Li, Sheng
Ma, Chenyang
Zou, Bochao
Sun, Li
Chen, Jiansheng
Xing, Junliang
Shi, Yuanchun
Ma, Huimin
contents Robotic assistants in long-term human-robot collaboration need to assist users under partial observations while leveraging cross-day interaction history. However, human traits and routines are often unknown at the beginning of collaboration, making passive infer-then-act assistance ineffective and inefficient. To address this challenge, we study a cross-day proactive asking setting for continual task assistance and propose PACT (Proactive Asking for Continual Task Assistance), an ask-or-act framework that determines whether clarification should be sought before taking action. PACT leverages current observations together with accumulated interaction history to evaluate contextual sufficiency, enabling the robot to provide more reliable assistance and progressively adapt to the user over time. We implement its primary learned instantiation using reinforcement learning and evaluate alternative instantiations under the same framework. To assess such behavior, we further introduce a clarification utility metric that quantifies the trade-off between assistance accuracy and the frequency of clarification requests. Experiments in multi-day embodied collaboration scenarios demonstrate that, compared with passive inference baselines, PACT consistently improves both assistance accuracy and clarification utility, highlighting the importance of proactive asking in continual human-robot collaboration.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_24350
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PACT: Proactive Asking for Continual Task Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration
He, Chengbo
Li, Sheng
Ma, Chenyang
Zou, Bochao
Sun, Li
Chen, Jiansheng
Xing, Junliang
Shi, Yuanchun
Ma, Huimin
Robotics
Human-Computer Interaction
Robotic assistants in long-term human-robot collaboration need to assist users under partial observations while leveraging cross-day interaction history. However, human traits and routines are often unknown at the beginning of collaboration, making passive infer-then-act assistance ineffective and inefficient. To address this challenge, we study a cross-day proactive asking setting for continual task assistance and propose PACT (Proactive Asking for Continual Task Assistance), an ask-or-act framework that determines whether clarification should be sought before taking action. PACT leverages current observations together with accumulated interaction history to evaluate contextual sufficiency, enabling the robot to provide more reliable assistance and progressively adapt to the user over time. We implement its primary learned instantiation using reinforcement learning and evaluate alternative instantiations under the same framework. To assess such behavior, we further introduce a clarification utility metric that quantifies the trade-off between assistance accuracy and the frequency of clarification requests. Experiments in multi-day embodied collaboration scenarios demonstrate that, compared with passive inference baselines, PACT consistently improves both assistance accuracy and clarification utility, highlighting the importance of proactive asking in continual human-robot collaboration.
title PACT: Proactive Asking for Continual Task Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration
topic Robotics
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24350