Rune Birkmose


2025

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On-Device LLMs for Home Assistant: Dual Role in Intent Detection and Response Generation
Rune Birkmose | Nathan Mørkeberg Reece | Esben Hofstedt Norvin | Johannes Bjerva | Mike Zhang
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text

This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuned on synthetic but domain-representative data, can perform the twofold task of (i) slot and intent detection and (ii) natural language response generation for a smart home assistant, while running solely on resource-limited, CPU-only edge hardware. We fine-tune LLMs to produce both JSON action calls and text responses. Our experiments show that 16-bit and 8-bit quantized variants preserve high accuracy on slot and intent detection and maintain strong semantic coherence in generated text, while the 4-bit model, while retaining generative fluency, suffers a noticeable drop in device-service classification accuracy. Further evaluations on noisy human (non-synthetic) prompts and out-of-domain intents confirm the models’ generalization ability, obtaining around 80–86% accuracy. While the average inference time is 5–6 seconds per query—acceptable for one-shot commands but suboptimal for multi-turn dialogue—our results affirm that an on-device LLM can effectively unify command interpretation and flexible response generation for home automation without relying on specialized hardware.