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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04000 |
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Table of Contents:
- Smart assistants increasingly act proactively, yet mistimed or intrusive behavior often causes users to lose trust and disable these features. Learning user preferences for proactive assistance is difficult because real-world studies are costly, limited in scale, and rarely capture how preferences change across multiple interaction sessions. Large language model based generative agents offer a way to simulate realistic interactions, but existing synthetic datasets remain limited in temporal depth, diverse personas, and multi-dimensional preferences. They also provide little support for transferring population-level insights to individual users under on-device constraints. We present a population-to-individual learning framework for preference-aligned proactive assistants that operates under on-device and privacy constraints. Our approach uses large-scale interaction simulation with 1,000 diverse personas to learn shared structure in how users express preferences across recurring dimensions such as timing, autonomy, and communication style, providing a strong cold start without relying on real user logs. The assistant then adapts to individual users on device through lightweight activation-based steering driven by simple interaction feedback, without model retraining or cloud-side updates. We evaluate the framework using controlled simulations with 1,000 simulated personas and a human-subject study with 30 participants. Results show improved timing decisions and perceived interaction quality over untuned and direct-response baselines, while on-device activation steering achieves performance comparable to reinforcement learning from human feedback. Participants also report higher satisfaction, trust, and comfort as the assistant adapts over multiple sessions of interactions.