RobotEQ: Towards Social Proactive Intelligence in Embodied Agents

Abstract

Embodied agents represent a prominent research focus across both academia and industry. The prevailing paradigm has gradually shifted from reactive assistance, which requires explicit user queries, to proactive assistance, capable of recognizing human needs and offering support without explicit instructions. Nevertheless, existing studies on proactive assistance remain confined to narrow scenarios and primarily emphasize task completeness, whereas real-world agents must operate in open-domain environments while adhering to social expectations. To bridge this gap, we extend the concept of proactive assistance to Social Proactive Intelligence (SPI), characterized by diverse scenarios, social understanding, and robot-centric behaviors. We further introduce RobotEQ, a dedicated benchmark for SPI. We first define two tasks: behavior judgment, emphasizing global contextual understanding, and spatial grounding, focusing on local perceptual details. Building on these tasks, we construct RobotEQ-Data, a dataset comprising 1,812 synthetic and 223 real-world scenarios, 7 social facets, 22K+ human annotations, 3K+ behavior judgment questions, and 3K+ spatial grounding questions. Furthermore, we establish RobotEQ-Bench to evaluate the performance of representative models. Experimental results demonstrate that current models fall short of achieving reliable SPI. Further analysis reveals that incorporating external social knowledge yields consistent improvements. This work aims to advance the development of socially desirable embodied agents in open-domain environments.