Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance
2026-06-03 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a system that helps people complete tasks by giving step-by-step advice and deciding the best moments to assist, especially when users do things out of order. They created a new large dataset called EgoProactive and combined several existing datasets into a unified benchmark to test such assistants. They also designed a new model architecture and a training method that works well across different AI models. Their experiments show their system outperforms other baselines in helping users recover from mistakes and guiding tasks effectively.
proactive assistanceegocentric datasetOut-of-Plan (OOP) recoveryprocedural guidanceplanner-interaction architecturetransfer learningLlama 4Qwen-3.6-VLbenchmark datasetsstep-by-step coaching
Authors
Kaustav Kundu, Ritvik Shrivastava, Maxim Arap, Nanshu Wang, Xianhui Zhu, Quintin Fettes, Gautam Tiwari, Parth Suresh, Théo Moutakanni, Alejandro Castillejo Munoz, Allen Bolourchi, Pascale Fung, Pinar Donmez, Babak Damavandi, Anuj Kumar, Seungwhan Moon
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. However, progress is limited by the absence of large-scale, cross-domain benchmarks that reflect realistic conditions, particularly the common case in which users deviate from the expected step sequence. We address this gap with four contributions: \textbf{(1)}~we release \textbf{EgoProactive}, a large-scale wearable-egocentric dataset for proactive procedural assistance with explicit Out-of-Plan (OOP) annotations and recovery steps; \textbf{(2)}~we augment five established benchmarks (Ego4D, EPIC-KITCHENS, EgoExo4D, HoloAssist, HowTo100M) into \textbf{Pro\textsuperscript{2}Bench} under a unified proactive-guidance schema; \textbf{(3)}~we propose a \textbf{decoupled planner--interaction architecture} specialized for procedural state, visual cues, and recovery injection; \textbf{(4)}~we introduce a post-training recipe that transfers across model families, validated by cross-backbone replication on Llama~4 and Qwen-3.6-VL. In extensive experiments, our trained Llama-4 system substantially improves objective intervention quality over strong proprietary baselines (Claude Opus~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro, GPT~5.2) and open-weight baselines (Qwen3~VL~235B) baselines across all six datasets. Oracle-plan experiments further show that, when plan quality is controlled, the trained duplex model produces high-quality guidance and large gains on Out-of-Plan recovery.