Litcius/Paper detail

Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Recognizers for Activities of Daily Living

Gabriele Civitarese, Michele Fiori, Priyankar Choudhary, Cláudio Bettini

2025ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology14 citationsDOIOpen Access PDF

Abstract

The sensor-based recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) in smart home environments enables several applications in the areas of energy management, safety, well-being, and healthcare. ADL recognition is typically based on deep learning methods requiring large datasets to be trained. Recently, several studies proved that Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively capture common-sense knowledge about human activities. However, the effectiveness of LLMs for ADL recognition in smart home environments still deserves to be investigated. In this work, we propose ADL-LLM, a novel LLM-based ADL recognition system. ADL-LLM transforms raw sensor data into textual representations, that are processed by an LLM to perform zero-shot ADL recognition. Moreover, in the scenario where a small labeled dataset is available, ADL-LLM can also be empowered with few-shot prompting. We evaluated ADL-LLM on two public datasets, showing its effectiveness in this domain.

Topics & Concepts

Computer scienceZero (linguistics)Shot (pellet)Artificial intelligenceLanguage modelNatural language processingSpeech recognitionLinguisticsChemistryPhilosophyOrganic chemistryContext-Aware Activity Recognition SystemsHuman Pose and Action RecognitionTechnology Use by Older Adults
Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Recognizers for Activities of Daily Living | Litcius