arXiv:2611.00610v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Natural-language driven smart home control remains challenging: cloud-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) raise privacy concerns, while local Small Language Models (SLMs) can generate invalid actions or misinterpret requests. We introduce Trail (Typed Registry-Anchored Inference for Language commands in Smart Homes), a fully local framework that replaces open-ended command generation with hierarchical typed decisions. Trail exploits the natural structure of a home's action space, selecting a room, device, and operation from candidates derived from the runtime device registry. This ensures valid actions while enabling confidence-based abstention when requests cannot be reliably resolved. We also design a structured memory module that uses typed decisions to support user preferences, device references, and multi-turn interactions. To evaluate Trail, we extend HomeBench and generate three datasets: Trek-Base, which tests natural-language variation; Trek-Robust, which evaluates robustness to changes in the home and its description; and Trek-Memory, which assesses conversational memory across multi-turn interactions. Trail achieves 85.3% accuracy on Trek-Robust versus 69.8% for a finetuned Qwen3.5-4B baseline, while remaining competitive on Trek-Base requests. With memory, Trail resolves 75.6% of the requests that depend on earlier turns, compared with 42.5% for the finetuned baseline given conversation history.
Abstract: Natural-language driven smart home control remains challenging: cloud-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) raise privacy concerns, while local Small Language Models (SLMs) can generate invalid actions or misinterpret requests. We introduce Trail (Typed Registry-Anchored Inference for Language commands in Smart Homes), a fully local framework that replaces open-ended command generation with hierarchical typed decisions. Trail exploits the natural structure of a home's action space, selecting a room, device, and operation from candidates derived from the runtime device registry. This ensures valid actions while enabling confidence-based abstention when requests cannot be reliably resolved. We also design a structured memory module that uses typed decisions to support user preferences, device references, and multi-turn interactions. To evaluate Trail, we extend HomeBench and generate three datasets: Trek-Base, which tests natural-language variation; Trek-Robust, which evaluates robustness to changes in the home and its description; and Trek-Memory, which assesses conversational memory across multi-turn interactions. Trail achieves 85.3% accuracy on Trek-Robust versus 69.8% for a finetuned Qwen3.5-4B baseline, while remaining competitive on Trek-Base requests. With memory, Trail resolves 75.6% of the requests that depend on earlier turns, compared with 42.5% for the finetuned baseline given conversation history.
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