Interaction & Multimodal, in order.

Map of Content for the interaction-multimodal domain — 7 concepts. Curated entry point; see Home for all domains.

• Encoder-Free Early Fusion — Multimodal design with minimal pre-processing instead of large standalone encoders: dMel audio embedding, 40×40-patch hMLP for frames, flow head for audio out, all co-trained from scratch in one transformer
• Full-Duplex Interaction — Perceive-and-respond simultaneously across modalities; proactive interjection, visual-cue reactions, simultaneous speech, live translation/commentary, time-aware speech — all special cases of model behavior
• Interaction / Background Model Split — Dual-model architecture: time-aware interaction model stays present; async background model handles deep reasoning/tools; rich-context-package delegation; "reasoning-model planning at non-thinking latency"
• Interaction Models — Thinking Machines Lab (May 2026): models that handle audio/video/text interaction natively in real time instead of via harness; interactivity scales with intelligence only if it's in the model
• Interactivity Benchmarks — FD-bench, Audio MultiChallenge + new TimeSpeak/CueSpeak (proactive audio) and RepCount-A/ProactiveVideoQA/Charades (visual proactivity); TML-Interaction-Small: 0.40s turn-taking latency, dominates interaction quality
• Time-Aligned Micro-Turns — The core interaction-model move: input/output as continuous streams in ~200ms interleaved chunks, no turn boundaries; streaming-sessions inference (upstreamed to SGLang), latency-tuned MoE kernels, bitwise trainer-sampler alignment
• Turn-Based Interface Bottleneck — Why current AI interfaces limit collaboration: single-thread turn-taking is a bandwidth bottleneck; humans pushed out by the interface, not the work; less-intelligent harness (VAD/turn-detection) should dissolve