Using LLMs for Late Multimodal Sensor Fusion for Activity Recognition

Ilker Demirel, Karan Thakkar, Benjamin Elizalde, Shirley You Ren, Jaya Narain

Keywords: time series, LLM reasoning, late fusion, sensor

Abstract: Sensor data streams provide valuable information around activities and context for downstream applications, though integrating complementary information can be challenging. We show that large language models (LLMs) can be used for late fusion for activity classification from audio and motion time series data. We curate a subset of data for diverse activity recognition across contexts (e.g., household activities, sports) from the Ego4D dataset. Evaluated LLMs achieve 12-class one-shot classification F1-scores significantly above chance, with no task-specific training. Zero-shot classification via LLM-based fusion from modality-specific models can enable multimodal temporal applications where there is limited aligned training data for directly learning a shared embedding space. Additionally, LLM-based fusion can enable model deploying without requiring additional memory and computation for targeted application-specific multimodal models.

Submission Number: 132