Evidence-Grounded SLM Behavioral Prediction Architecture for Future Assistance Use

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.