When moments of need cluster in time, does a cooldown, a boost or a back-off help an always-on assistant at equal annoyance?
research/ambient-cluster
When moments of need cluster in time, does a cooldown, boost or back-off help an always-on assistant at equal annoyance: an episode-aware boost gains up to 0.05 recall under strong clustering, a cooldown always loses recall, back-off is a wash; stylised simulation.
What it found
Needs are made to cluster with a hidden episode/quiet chain (overall rate fixed at 3% of 10 s windows), and a plain score threshold is compared with three stateful rules at the same budget of false interruptions per hour, paired over 10 seeds. With strong clustering an episode-aware boost (lower the threshold after an accepted answer) raises recall by 0.039 at 1 false/h and 0.054 at 4 (0.467 to 0.521); a cooldown after speaking loses recall everywhere, up to 0.066; a back-off after a dismissal is within noise or slightly negative. Without clustering nothing helps. At the 1 false/h budget the boost also overshoots the budget slightly (1.19 vs 1.11). Stylised: false alarms are independent of the episode state, feedback is exact and immediate, every distribution is chosen, no real conversations.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.