Just-In-Time Objectives: A General Approach for Specialized AI Interactions

Large language models promise a broad set of functions, but when not given a specific objective, they default to milquetoast results such as drafting emails littered with cliches. We demonstrate that inferring the user's in-the-moment objective, then rapidly optimizing for that singular objective, enables LLMs to produce tools, interfaces, and responses that are more responsive and desired. We contribute an architecture for automatically inducing just-in-time objectives by passively observing user behavior, then steering downstream AI systems through generation and evaluation against this objective. Inducing just-in-time objectives (e.g., "Clarify the abstract's research contribution") enables automatic generation of tools, e.g., those that critique a draft based on relevant HCI methodologies, anticipate related researchers' reactions, or surface ambiguous terminology. In a series of experiments (N=14, N=205) on participants' own tasks, JIT objectives enable LLM outputs that achieve 66-86% win rates over typical LLMs, and in-person use sessions (N=17) confirm that JIT objectives produce specialized tools unique to each participant.