Nilam Ram

h-index1
2papers
3citations

2 Papers

31.1CLMar 6Code
Learning Next Action Predictors from Human-Computer Interaction

Omar Shaikh, Valentin Teutschbein, Kanishk Gandhi et al.

Truly proactive AI systems must anticipate what we will do next. This foresight demands far richer information than the sparse signals we type into our prompts -- it demands reasoning over the entire context of what we see and do. We formalize this as next action prediction (NAP): given a sequence of a user's multimodal interactions with a computer (screenshots, clicks, sensor data), predict that user's next action. Progress on this task requires both new data and modeling approaches. To scale data, we annotate longitudinal, naturalistic computer use with vision-language models. We release an open-source pipeline for performing this labeling on private infrastructure, and label over 360K actions across one month of continuous phone usage from 20 users, amounting to 1,800 hours of screen time. We then introduce LongNAP, a user model that combines parametric and in-context learning to reason over long interaction histories. LongNAP is trained via policy gradient methods to generate user-specific reasoning traces given some context; retrieve relevant traces from a library of past traces; and then apply retrieved traces in-context to predict future actions. Using an LLM-as-judge evaluation metric (0-1 similarity to ground truth), LongNAP significantly outperforms supervised finetuning and prompted baselines on held-out data (by 79% and 39% respectively). Additionally, LongNAP generalizes to held out users when trained across individuals. The space of next actions a user might take at any moment is unbounded, spanning thousands of possible outcomes. Despite this, 17.1% of LongNAP's predicted trajectories are well-aligned with what a user does next (LLM-judge score $\geq$ 0.5). This rises to 26% when we filter to highly confident predictions. In sum, we argue that learning from the full context of user behavior to anticipate user needs is now a viable task with substantial opportunity.

9.2HCMar 13
Daily Affect Fluctuations in Phone Screen Content Predict Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms

Christopher A. Kelly, Yikun Chi, Nicholas Haber et al.

The relationship between digital media use and mental health remains poorly understood, in part because real-world digital behavior is rarely captured at scale. This intensive longitudinal study tracked participants' complete natural smartphone interactions over one year. We collected screenshots every 5 seconds from 145 adults (yielding 111 million screenshots), alongside biweekly assessments of anxiety and depression (mean = 24 surveys). The valence and arousal of each screenshot were assessed using a deep learning affect model. Individuals showed highly idiosyncratic media patterns, with substantially more variance in anxiety and depression accounted for within-person than between-person. Day-to-day fluctuations in the valence and arousal of a person's screen content predicted subsequent changes in depression and anxiety, whereas between-person differences did not. Specifically, greater exposure to low-arousal negative content was associated with higher depression and anxiety. These findings underscore the dynamic, idiosyncratic nature of digital consumption and the need for targeted measurement and intervention.