Assistance Without Interruption: A Benchmark and LLM-based Framework for Non-Intrusive Human-Robot Assistance

TL;DR

This paper introduces NIABench, a benchmark and LLM-based framework for non-intrusive human-robot assistance that supports ongoing human activities without interruptions, emphasizing timing and decision-making.

Contribution

It formalizes non-intrusive assistance as a new HRI paradigm, establishes a benchmark, and proposes a hybrid LLM-based architecture for proactive, non-intrusive support.

Findings

The proposed method reduces human effort in tasks.

NIABench provides a systematic evaluation platform.

Experiments show effective timing and decision-making in assistance.

Abstract

Human-robot interaction (HRI) has long studied how agents and people coordinate to achieve shared goals. In this work, we formalize and benchmark the non-intrusive assistance as an independent paradigm of HRI, where a robot proactively supports a human's ongoing multi-step activities while strictly avoiding interruptions. Unlike conventional HRI tasks that rely on direct commands, explicit negotiation, or proactive interventions based on user habits and history, our task treats the human's plan as the primary process and formulates assistance as a joint decision over when to act and what to do. To systematically evaluate this problem, we establish a simulation benchmark, NIABench, along with new metrics tailored to the non-intrusive assistance task. We further propose a hybrid architecture that integrates an LLM with a scoring model. The scoring model first applies semantic retrieval to prune large candidate action sets, and then a ranker evaluates human-step and robot-action pairs, enabling reasoning over timing and cross-step dependencies. Comprehensive experiments on both NIABench and real-world scenarios demonstrate that our method achieves proactive, non-intrusive assistance that reduces human effort while preserving task effectiveness.