Abstract: A user equipment may be configured to implement a procedure for employing flow-based traffic categorization for device optimization. In some aspects, the UE may monitor application traffic of one or more applications installed on the UE, and determine one or more observation features of the application traffic within an observation period. Further, the user equipment may predict, via a machine learning model, a traffic category of the observation period based on the one or more observation features, and apply an optimization to second application traffic of the one or more applications at the UE based on the traffic category.