The Hidden States Cookbook: A Large-Scale Ablation Study for Noise-Robust Conversational Intent Classification in Industry

Abstract

Conversational database interfaces face a critical challenge: users naturally embed queries in conversational noise (greetings, politeness, off-topic remarks), which degrades intent classification accuracy and wastes computational resources. Despite advances in orchestration and retrieval strategies, a fundamental question remains unanswered: which pooling strategy maximizes intent classification accuracy under realistic conversational noise in production language models? This work addresses this gap through 360 controlled experiments spanning four pooling configurations (mean, max, last-token, attention, and FFT-augmented variants) using Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct on BANKING77 and CLINC150 datasets under clean/noisy conditions with ten random seeds. Key findings reveal that attention pooling consistently outperforms alternative strategies under noisy conditions (~+2.6-2.8 F1 over the default), while mean pooling degrades performance by up to ~5 F1 points. Frequency-domain filtering does not produce consistent accuracy improvements and functions primarily as a structural variation rather than an accuracy-enhancing component. These results provide concrete, evidence-based guidance for building noise-robust conversational classifiers: attention pooling is recommended for noisy interfaces, mean pooling should be avoided, and last-token pooling is appropriate for clean-query scenarios.