Driver-WM: A Driver-Centric Traffic-Conditioned Latent World Model for In-Cabin Dynamics Rollout

Safe L2/L3 driving automation requires anticipating human-in-the-loop reactions during shared-control transitions. While most driving world models forecast the external environment, in-cabin intelligence remains strictly recognition-oriented and lacks multi-step rollout capabilities for driver dynamics. We introduce Driver-WM, a driver-centric latent world model that rolls out in-cabin dynamics causally conditioned on out-cabin traffic context. This formulation unifies physical kinematics forecasting with auxiliary behavioral and emotional semantic recognition. Operating in a compact latent space constructed from frozen vision-language features, Driver-WM adopts a dual-stream architecture to separately encode external traffic and internal driver states. These streams are directionally coupled via a gated causal injection mechanism, which uses a learned vector gate to modulate external contextual perturbations while strictly enforcing temporal causality. Evaluations on a multi-task assistive driving benchmark demonstrate that Driver-WM yields robust long-horizon geometric forecasting for reactive high-motion maneuvers and improves semantic alignment for both driver and traffic states. Finally, the explicit external-to-internal conditioning allows for controlled test-time interventions to systematically analyze mechanism responses.

Event-Driven Proactive Assistive Manipulation with Grounded Vision-Language Planning

Assistance in collaborative manipulation is often initiated by user instructions, making high-level reasoning request-driven. In fluent human teamwork, however, partners often infer the next helpful step from the observed outcome of an action rather than waiting for instructions. Motivated by this, we introduce a shift from request-driven assistance to event-driven proactive assistance, where robot actions are initiated by workspace state transitions induced by human--object interactions rather than user-provided task instructions. To this end, we propose an event-driven framework that tracks interaction progress with an event monitor and, upon event completion, extracts stabilized pre/post snapshots that characterize the resulting state transition. Given the stabilized snapshots, the planner analyzes the implied state transition to infer a task-level goal and decide whether to intervene; if so, it generates a sequence of assistive actions. To make outputs executable and verifiable, we restrict actions to a set of action primitives and reference objects via integer IDs. We evaluate the framework on a real tabletop number-block collaboration task, demonstrating that explicit pre/post state-change evidence improves proactive completion on solvable scenes and appropriate waiting on unsolvable ones.