See Better, Foresee Better, Act Wiser: Physically Grounded Proactive Modeling and Decision Making

Many moments in the real world do not wait for a user to ask. A fire starts on a security monitor, an expression flickers across a video call, or a product a viewer wants flashes by in a livestream. Yet today's large models remain mostly turn-based by design: they answer only when addressed, and even video-call apps that appear interactive still operate as question-answer systems, reacting only when polled or prompted. We argue for a different paradigm: a model that is present in the world like a person. It continuously watches what is happening now, decides on its own whether to speak or stay silent, interacts in real time, and delegates to a background model when the problem is hard. To advance interaction models and their adoption across domains, we make two fully open-sourced contributions. First, we release JoyAI-VL-Interaction, an 8B-scale, vision-first VL-interaction model. The model makes the response decision internally, choosing each second to stay silent, respond, or delegate to a background model, and it excels at vision-triggered responsiveness and time awareness. We pair it with a transferable training recipe, from which capabilities we never trained for emerge, such as guiding a shopper through changing app screens or improvising a lecture from a slide deck. Second, we release a complete, deployable system built around that model. The system streams any ongoing video into the model, making it genuinely present in the world. All other components are pluggable, including ASR/TTS modules, memory, visualization UI, and a background brain that can connect to any API or agent. Across six real-world scenarios, human raters prefer JoyAI-VL-Interaction over the in-app video-call assistants of Doubao and Gemini by a wide margin. To our knowledge, this is the first open, vision-driven interaction model released together with its training recipe, data, and complete deployable system.

Anticipating whether a person will interact from one's own perspective is a highly intuitive task for humans, that relies on a combination of cues. We investigate how humans perform at predicting a person's intention to interact from a service robot's point of view, using pose-only or full video input, then benchmark different lightweight pose-based models and state-of-the-art vision-language models. We conducted our benchmark on the HUI360 dataset on a fixed pilot subset of 100 test tracks (25 positive, 75 negative). We found that with pose-only input, human annotators outperform lightweight trained pose models but not by large margins (+0.08 in F1-Score). But when given full egocentric video with a target bounding box, human annotators perform substantially better and largely outperform the Vision-Language Models (+0.2 in F1-Score). We also compared VLMs of different size and under different input conditions, and found that the best results do not correlate with model size. Our result confirms that predicting interactions is a challenging task for social robots and that reasoning-capable models are necessary but their actual reasoning capabilities alone do not suffice to match the social intuition of humans.

Many agents in real-world environments cannot reliably communicate their goals through language, including household pets, pre-verbal infants, and other non-speaking embodied agents. In such settings, intent must be inferred from incomplete behavioral observations in context-rich environments. This creates a core ambiguity: observable behavior is often noisy or underspecified, while context provides strong prior information but can also induce brittle shortcut predictions if used naively. We present CatSignal, a Bayesian-inspired probabilistic framework for multimodal intent inference that models spatial context as a prior-like constraint and behavioral observations as evidence. Rather than treating context as an ordinary input feature, our method uses a context-gated Product-of-Experts formulation to compute posterior-like intent distributions from context, pose dynamics, and acoustic cues. We instantiate this formulation in a household cat setting as a focused proof-of-concept for intent inference in non-speaking agents. Under Leave-One-Video-Out evaluation on a multimodal domestic cat dataset, the proposed prior-guided fusion achieves the best overall accuracy of 77.72%, outperforming feature concatenation (71.83%) and stronger late-fusion baselines. More importantly, it substantially reduces context-driven shortcut failures in ambiguous cases. While simpler fusion strategies remain competitive in Macro-F1 and selective prediction, the proposed model provides the strongest overall accuracy and the best suppression of context-based shortcut collapse.