MindHelper: Closed-Loop Embodied Mental-State Reasoning for Precision Intervention

Abstract:Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning enables embodied agents to understand human beliefs, goals, and intentions, but existing benchmarks mainly evaluate this ability through offline question answering or scenario-level action prediction. MindPower advances embodied ToM by introducing robot-centric reasoning from perception to action; however, it does not evaluate whether an agent can continuously interact with a changing environment and intervene only when assistance is needed. Building on MindPower, we introduce the MindHelper Challenge, which extends embodied ToM evaluation to real-time closed-loop precision intervention. An agent must continuously observe the environment, maintain actor-specific beliefs, identify when a human requires assistance, generate executable actions, and remain silent when intervention is unnecessary. We further propose MindClaw, a simple yet effective Claw-style framework that integrates an actor-specific Belief Table, embodied cognitive skills, and a Trigger-based cognitive dispatcher. Experiments show that MindClaw achieves 36.63% precise intervention rate and 14.36\% task accuracy, substantially outperforming direct VLM baselines, whose corresponding results remain below 12.05% and 3.80%.

Extended version of the CVPR 2026 paper *MindPower: Enabling Theory-of-Mind Reasoning in VLM-based Embodied Agents*. This work is in progress

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2606.01063 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2606.01063v3 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.01063 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.