Evaluating Few-Shot Temporal Reasoning of LLMs for Human Activity Prediction in Smart Environments

TL;DR

This paper investigates the ability of large language models to predict human activities and durations in smart environments using few-shot learning, demonstrating their strong temporal reasoning even with minimal examples.

Contribution

It introduces a retrieval-augmented prompting strategy for LLMs to enhance human activity prediction in low-data settings, showing their effectiveness in temporal reasoning tasks.

Findings

LLMs exhibit strong zero-shot temporal understanding of human activities.

Adding one or two demonstrations improves prediction accuracy and duration calibration.

Performance saturates beyond a few examples, indicating diminishing returns.

Abstract

Anticipating human activities and their durations is essential in applications such as smart-home automation, simulation-based architectural and urban design, activity-based transportation system simulation, and human-robot collaboration, where adaptive systems must respond to human activities. Existing data-driven agent-based models--from rule-based to deep learning--struggle in low-data environments, limiting their practicality. This paper investigates whether large language models, pre-trained on broad human knowledge, can fill this gap by reasoning about everyday activities from compact contextual cues. We adopt a retrieval-augmented prompting strategy that integrates four sources of context--temporal, spatial, behavioral history, and persona--and evaluate it on the CASAS Aruba smart-home dataset. The evaluation spans two complementary tasks: next-activity prediction with duration estimation, and multi-step daily sequence generation, each tested with various numbers of few-shot examples provided in the prompt. Analyzing few-shot effects reveals how much contextual supervision is sufficient to balance data efficiency and predictive accuracy, particularly in low-data environments. Results show that large language models exhibit strong inherent temporal understanding of human behavior: even in zero-shot settings, they produce coherent daily activity predictions, while adding one or two demonstrations further refines duration calibration and categorical accuracy. Beyond a few examples, performance saturates, indicating diminishing returns. Sequence-level evaluation confirms consistent temporal alignment across few-shot conditions. These findings suggest that pre-trained language models can serve as promising temporal reasoners, capturing both recurring routines and context-dependent behavioral variations, thereby strengthening the behavioral modules of agent-based models.