cs.ROApr 9, 2026

Exploring Temporal Representation in Neural Processes for Multimodal Action Prediction

Authors: Marco Gabriele Fedozzi, Yukie Nagai, Francesco Rea, Alessandra Sciutti

Organizations: DIBRIS Department, University of Genoa, Via All’Opera Pia 13 16145 Genoa, Italy · CONTACT Unit, Italian Institute of Technology, Via Enrico Melen 83, 16152 Genoa, Italy · International Research Center for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan

Abstract

Inspired by the human ability to understand and predict others, we study the applicability of Conditional Neural Processes (CNP) to the task of self-supervised multimodal action prediction in robotics. Following recent results regarding the ontogeny of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), we focus on the preliminary objective of self-actions prediction. We find a good MNS-inspired model in the existing Deep Modality Blending Network (DMBN), able to reconstruct the visuo-motor sensory signal during a partially observed action sequence by leveraging the probabilistic generation of CNP. After a qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we highlight its difficulties in generalizing to unseen action sequences, and identify the cause in its inner representation of time. Therefore, we propose a revised version, termed DMBN-Positional Time Encoding (DMBN-PTE), that facilitates learning a more robust representation of temporal information, and provide preliminary results of its effectiveness in expanding the applicability of the architecture. DMBN-PTE figures as a first step in the development of robotic systems that autonomously learn to forecast actions on longer time scales refining their predictions with incoming observations.

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