SysCaps: Language Interfaces for Simulation Surrogates of Complex Systems

Understand

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.