SysCaps: Language Interfaces for Simulation Surrogates of Complex Systems

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission12317 Authors

Keywords: surrogate models, multimodal text and timeseries models, language-interfaced regression

TL;DR: Augmenting surrogate models of complex systems with natural language interfaces.

Abstract:

Surrogate models are used to predict the behavior of complex energy systems that are too expensive to simulate with traditional numerical methods.
Our work introduces the use of language descriptions, which we call "system captions" or SysCaps, to interface with such surrogates.
We argue that interacting with surrogates through text, particularly natural language, makes these models more accessible for both experts and non-experts.
We introduce a lightweight multimodal text and timeseries regression model and a training pipeline that uses large language models (LLMs) to synthesize high-quality captions from simulation metadata.
Our experiments on two real-world simulators of buildings and wind farms show that our SysCaps-augmented surrogates have better accuracy on held-out systems than traditional methods while enjoying new generalization abilities, such as handling semantically related descriptions of the same test system.
Additional experiments also highlight the potential of SysCaps to unlock language-driven design space exploration and to regularize training through prompt augmentation.

Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)

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Submission Number: 12317