Safety as Computation: Certified Answer Reuse via Capability Closure in Task-Oriented Dialogue
This addresses efficiency and safety issues in dialogue systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing capability-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of redundant computation in task-oriented dialogue systems by introducing a new paradigm where safety certification enables answer reuse, achieving sub-millisecond query response times.
We introduce a new paradigm for task-oriented dialogue systems: safety certification as a computational primitive for answer reuse. Current systems treat each turn independently, recomputing answers via retrieval or generation even when they are already derivable from prior state. We show that in capability-based systems, the safety certification step computes a fixed-point closure cl(At) that already contains every answer reachable from the current configuration. We operationalize this insight with a Certified Answer Store (CAS) augmented by Pre-Answer Blocks (PAB): at each certified turn, the system materializes all derivable follow-up answers together with minimal provenance witnesses. Subsequent queries are answered in sub-millisecond time via formal containment checks, eliminating redundant retrieval and generation.