Proactive Rejection and Grounded Execution: A Dual-Stage Intent Analysis Paradigm for Safe and Efficient AIoT Smart Homes
Authors: Xinxin Jin, Zhengwei Ni, Zhengguo Sheng, Victor C. M. Leung
Organizations: School of Information and Electronic Engineering (Sussex Artificial Intelligence Institute), Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310018, China. · Sussex Artificial Intelligent Institute, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310018, China · Department of Engineering and Design, University of Sussex, BN1 9RH, Brighton, U.K. · Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, Shenzhen 518172, China · College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition from information providers to embodied agents in the Internet of Things (IoT), they face significant challenges regarding reliability and interaction efficiency. Direct execution of LLM-generated commands often leads to entity hallucinations (e.g., trying to control non-existent devices). Meanwhile, existing iterative frameworks (e.g., SAGE) suffer from the Interaction Frequency Dilemma, oscillating between reckless execution and excessive user questioning. To address these issues, we propose a Dual-Stage Intent-Aware (DS-IA) Framework. This framework separates high-level user intent understanding from low-level physical execution. Specifically, Stage 1 serves as a semantic firewall to filter out invalid instructions and resolve vague commands by checking the current state of the home. Stage 2 then employs a deterministic cascade verifier-a strict, step-by-step rule checker that verifies the room, device, and capability in sequence-to ensure the action is actually physically possible before execution. Extensive experiments on the HomeBench and SAGE benchmarks demonstrate that DS-IA achieves an Exact Match (EM) rate of 58.56% (outperforming baselines by over 28%) and improves the rejection rate of invalid instructions to 87.04%. Evaluations on the SAGE benchmark further reveal that DS-IA resolves the Interaction Frequency Dilemma by balancing proactive querying with state-based inference. Specifically, it boosts the Autonomous Success Rate (resolving tasks without unnecessary user intervention) from 42.86% to 71.43%, while maintaining high precision in identifying irreducible ambiguities that truly necessitate human clarification. These results underscore the framework's ability to minimize user disturbance through accurate environmental grounding.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Failure mechanisms in existing reactive frameworks. (a) Task Omission: The agent loses global context when trapped in multi-turn interactions. (b) Forced Hallucination: The agent forcibly maps an unexecutable command to an incorrect entity due to the lack of a proactive rejection mechanism.
Framework Type
Representative Methods
Reasoning Paradigm
Ambiguity Strategy
Physical Safety
Main Limitation
Slot Filling
BERT-based
Supervised / Template
None
High (Template-bound)
Poor generalization to unseen commands
Direct Generation
GPT-3.5/4
End-to-End
Model Probability
Low (Prone to Hallucination)
Severe entity hallucinations; no feedback
Reactive Agents
SAGE [ 3 ] , ReAct [ 16 ]
Iterative (Think-Act Loop)
Passive (On Error)
Medium
Interaction Frequency Dilemma ; Disturbing
Uncertainty Planning
Ren et al. [ 4 ]
Probabilistic Alignment
Confidence Threshold
Medium
Linguistic confidence = Physical truth
DS-IA (Ours)
This Work
Analyze-then-Act (Dual-Stage)
Active State-Awareness
Very High (Cascade Check)
Dependent on real-time snapshot freshness
TABLE I: Comparison of Smart Home Control Frameworks. DS-IA achieves the best balance between physical safety and interaction efficiency.
Fig. 2: Workflow of the Dual-Stage Intent-Aware (DS-IA) Framework. This image shows the modular architecture: Stage 1 proactively analyzes intent, and Stage 2 utilizes a cascade verifier shield to ensure physical feasibility.
Task Category
Instruction Example
Targeted Metric & Capability
VS (Valid Single)
"Turn on the lamp."
EM & F1: Evaluates normal instruction-following recall.
VM (Valid Multi)
"Turn on lamp, lock door."
IS (Invalid Single)
"Turn on the oven."
Rejection Rate: Evaluates safety and hallucination suppression.
IM (Invalid Multi)
"Turn on oven and heater."
MM (Mixed Multi)
"Turn on lamp and oven."
EM & F1: Evaluates filter ability.
TABLE II: Taxonomy of HomeBench Tasks and Metric Mapping. (Assuming St does NOT contain an Oven)
Method
VS (Valid Single)
IS (Invalid Single)
VM (Valid Multi)
IM (Invalid Multi)
MM (Mixed Multi)
Overall
EM
F1
EM
F1
EM
F1
EM
F1
EM
F1
EM
F1
Baseline
66.96%
66.89%
14.07%
14.08%
37.55%
69.18%
0.00%
5.82%
0.49%
33.23%
29.98%
35.72%
SAGE
48.63%
49.18%
29.84%
29.84%
9.09%
47.42%
0.00%
0.00%
1.77%
29.80%
1.77%
30.84%
DS-IA (Ours)
50.40%
50.37%
87.04%
87.16%
50.00%
76.98%
38.46%
73.08%
24.49%
77.42%
58.56%
74.90%
TABLE III: Performance Comparison on HomeBench (EM: Exact Match, F1: F1-Score). Bold indicates best performance.
Fig. 3: Visual comparison of handling a non-existent device instruction on HomeBench. SAGE hallucinates a target (Forced Grounding), while DS-IA correctly rejects the command (Early Rejection).
Method
Safety
Stage 1 (Intent Analysis)
Stage 2 (Code Generation)
IS EM (Rejection)
Calls
Tokens
Calls
Tokens
No IA Baseline
83.29%
0
0
1,000
2,982,070
DS-IA (Ours)
88.69%
1,000
3,262,848
819
2,554,231
TABLE IV: Ablation on Safety and Efficiency (1,000 Tasks). DS-IA boosts physical safety (Rejection Rate) while trading cheap input tokens to massively reduce expensive autoregressive code generation cycles.
Task Category
SAGE (Baseline)
DS-IA (Ours)
Global Judgment Metrics
Clarification Succ. Rate (Ambiguous)
75.00%
75.00%
Autonomous Succ. Rate (Clear)
42.86%
71.43%
Detailed Task Succ. Rate Breakdown
Intent Resolution
33.33%
70.83%
Device Resolution
46.15%
69.44%
TABLE V: Task Success Rate (Succ. Rate) Breakdown on SAGE Benchmark. Success is achieved by either safe autonomous execution or correct proactive clarification.
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Fig. 4: The complete constraint-aware prompt templates utilized in the DS-IA framework. (a) The Stage 1 prompt acts as a semantic firewall to extract diagnostic reasoning. (b) The Stage 2 prompt generates the final execution sequence, integrating strict negative constraints ( e.g., utilizing error_input for unexecutable actions) to enforce physical grounding.