# Proximal State Nudging: Reducing Skill Atrophy from AI Assistance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20355 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20355/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06461/) (2015)
- [OpenAI Gym](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01540/) (2016)
- [Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03622/) (2022)
- [Shared Autonomy via Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01744/) (2018)
- [Shared Autonomy via Hindsight Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.07619/) (2015)
- [Learning from Active Human Involvement through Proxy Value Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03369/) (2025)
- [Towards Modeling and Influencing the Dynamics of Human Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00901/) (2023)
- [Assistive Teaching of Motor Control Tasks to Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14003/) (2022)
- [Decision-Making in Driver-Automation Shared Control: A Review and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12597/) (2020)
- [COACH: Cooperative Robot Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06199/) (2023)
- [Dreaming to Assist: Learning to Align with Human Objectives for Shared Control in High-Speed Racing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10062/) (2024)
- [Blending Data-Driven Priors in Dynamic Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14174/) (2024)
- [Shared Autonomy for Proximal Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19899/) (2025)
- [Highly Parallelized Data-driven MPC for Minimal Intervention Shared Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02318/) (2019)
- [Training LLM Agents to Empower Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13709/) (2025)
- [Task-Based Hybrid Shared Control for Training Through Forceful Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07983/) (2019)
- [SimCoachCorpus: A naturalistic dataset with language and trajectories for embodied teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14548/) (2025)
- [Simultaneous Achievement of Driver Assistance and Skill Development in Shared and Cooperative Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00802/) (2019)
- [Injecting Conflict Situations in Autonomous Driving Simulation using CARLA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16476/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Skill atrophy, the gradual decline of human capability under AI assistance, poses a safety risk in shared-control of semi-autonomous systems, where operators may be unable to distinguish their own inputs from autonomous corrections. We propose Proximal State Nudging (PSN), a shared autonomy algorithm that jointly optimizes for skill development and task performance by nudging users toward states estimated to be most learnable. We first show that PSN outperforms existing shared autonomy baselines in balancing student improvement in unassisted reward with overall shared performance, using simulated students in the classic LunarLander environment. We then present, to the best of our knowledge, the first human subject studies of a planner incorporating learning-compatible shared autonomy: across two driving tasks in the CARLA simulator (High Performance Racing and Parallel Parking, n = 60), PSN produces up to 7x larger gains in unassisted skill than standard blended shared autonomy, while incurring 50% fewer collisions than unassisted self-practice.