Timing the Message: Language-Based Notifications for Time-Critical Assistive Settings

Abstract: In time-critical settings such as assistive driving, assistants often rely on alerts or haptic signals to prompt rapid human attention, but these cues usually leave humans to interpret situations and decide responses independently, introducing potential delays or ambiguity in meaning. Language-based assistive systems can instead provide instructions backed by context, offering more informative guidance. However, current approaches (e.g., social assistive robots) largely prioritize content generation while overlooking critical timing factors such as verbal conveyance duration, human comprehension delays, and subsequent follow-through duration. These timing considerations are crucial in time-critical settings, where even minor delays can substantially affect outcomes. We aim to study this inherent trade-off between timeliness and informativeness by framing the challenge as a sequential decision-making problem using an augmented-state Markov Decision Process. We design a framework combining reinforcement learning and a generated offline taxonomy dataset, where we balance the trade-off while enabling a scalable taxonomy dataset generation pipeline. Empirical evaluation with synthetic humans shows our framework improves success rates by over 40% compared to methods that ignore time delays, while effectively balancing timeliness and informativeness. It also exposes an often-overlooked trade-off between these two factors, opening new directions for optimizing communication in time-critical human-AI assistance.