Engagement Process: A New Formalism for Temporal Interaction
A new paper on arXiv (2605.11484) introduces Engagement Process (EP), an interaction formalism that extends POMDPs by making time explicit in the action-observation interface. EP decouples actions and observations into separate event streams along time, rather than pairing them at fixed decision steps. This captures timing issues like deliberation latency, delayed feedback, and persistent actions. Experiments across toy domains, LLM agents, and learning tasks show EP reveals temporal behaviors hidden by step-based interfaces.
Key facts
- Engagement Process (EP) is an interaction formalism
- EP inherits decision-theoretic structure of POMDPs
- Actions and observations are decoupled event streams along time
- Captures deliberation latency, delayed feedback, persistent actions
- Supports multi-rate coordination and compositional interaction
- Tested on toy, LLM-agent, and learning experiments
- arXiv ID: 2605.11484
- Published as arXiv preprint
Entities
Institutions
- arXiv