Multi-Resident Data Association in Smart Homes via MDP Modeling and Behavior Cloning

Xi Chen, Julien Cumin, Fano Ramparany, Dominique Vaufreydaz

Ambient sensors offer a privacy-preserving solution for activity recognition in smart homes, yet they face a critical challenge in multi-resident environments known as Data Association, which aims to identify the resident triggering a specific anonymous sensor event. Existing approaches fundamentally fail to maintain global consistency by often yielding conflicting associations for silent residents. Additionally, these methods frequently suffer from severe trajectory fragmentation caused by the ontological mismatch of applying continuous physical motion models to discrete logical behaviors. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that reformulates data association as a sequential decision-making task within a Markov Decision Process (MDP). We solve the defined MDP via Behavior Cloning (BC) to avoid complex reward engineering by directly learning from expert demonstrations. We instantiate the policy using two complementary architectures, including a lightweight Transformer that treats association as a multi-label classification task over linearized event histories, and a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM) that reformulates the problem as conditional text…