Evidence-Grounded SLM Behavioral Prediction Architecture for Future Assistance Use

arXiv:2610.32193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Users often exhibit changes in interaction behavior before explicitly seeking assistance, enabling systems to anticipate future assistance use. This is especially important in high-stakes environments, where delayed assistance can have operational, financial, or safety consequences. However, conventional Large Language Models (LLMs) are often unsuitable for continuous on-device behavioral prediction because of their computational and memory demands. Behavioral patterns are also highly individual and device-specific, motivating local processing that preserves privacy and data sovereignty. Small Language Models (SLMs) offer a promising alternative, but their ability to reason reliably over low-level sequential interaction events remains underexplored. This study introduces Evidence-Grounded Local Behavioral Prediction (ELBP), a four-layer architecture combining deterministic interaction processing, dual-view behavioral representation, SLM-based prediction, and evidence verification with abstention. Three instruction-tuned models of 3B parameters or fewer were evaluated using raw, structured, dual-view, and complete ELBP configurations. The best-performing model, Qwen2.5-3B with ELBP, achieved a full-set F1-score of 0.80 and PR-AUC of 0.84, representing a 15.9\% relative improvement over raw-event prompting and 17.6\% over XGBoost, while full-set ECE decreased by 43.2\% relative to raw-event prompting. With evidence verification and abstention, selective F1 increased to 0.84 at 91\% coverage and evidence support reached 96\%. These results show that structured behavioral representation and evidence-verified selective prediction can improve the reliability of behavioral forecasting in SLMs.