Heng Tan

Hua Yan, Heng Tan, Yi Ding et al.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors is critical for applications in healthcare, safety, and industrial production. However, variations in activity patterns, device types, and sensor placements create distribution gaps across datasets, reducing the performance of HAR models. To address this, we propose LanHAR, a novel system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate semantic interpretations of sensor readings and activity labels for cross-dataset HAR. This approach not only mitigates cross-dataset heterogeneity but also enhances the recognition of new activities. LanHAR employs an iterative re-generation method to produce high-quality semantic interpretations with LLMs and a two-stage training framework that bridges the semantic interpretations of sensor readings and activity labels. This ultimately leads to a lightweight sensor encoder suitable for mobile deployment, enabling any sensor reading to be mapped into the semantic interpretation space. Experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both cross-dataset HAR and new activity recognition. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/DASHLab/LanHAR.

Heng Tan, Hua Yan, Yu Yang

Shared micromobility services such as e-scooters and bikes have become an integral part of urban transportation, yet their efficiency critically depends on effective vehicle rebalancing. Existing methods either optimize for average demand patterns or employ robust optimization and reinforcement learning to handle predefined uncertainties. However, these approaches overlook emergent events (e.g., demand surges, vehicle outages, regulatory interventions) or sacrifice performance in normal conditions. We introduce AMPLIFY, an LLM-augmented policy adaptation framework for shared micromobility rebalancing. The framework combines a baseline rebalancing module with an LLM-based adaptation module that adjusts strategies in real time under emergent scenarios. The adaptation module ingests system context, demand predictions, and baseline strategies, and refines adjustments through self-reflection. Evaluations on real-world e-scooter data from Chicago show that our approach improves demand satisfaction and system revenue compared to baseline policies, highlighting the potential of LLM-driven adaptation as a flexible solution for managing uncertainty in micromobility systems.

Heng Tan, Hua Yan, Yu Yang

While reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in various domains, training effective policies for complex tasks remains challenging. Agents often converge to local optima and fail to maximize long-term rewards. Existing approaches to mitigate training bottlenecks typically fall into two categories: (i) Automated policy refinement, which identifies critical states from past trajectories to guide policy updates, but suffers from costly and uncertain model training; and (ii) Human-in-the-loop refinement, where human feedback is used to correct agent behavior, but this does not scale well to environments with large or continuous action spaces. In this work, we design a large language model-guided policy modulation framework that leverages LLMs to improve RL training without additional model training or human intervention. We first prompt an LLM to identify critical states from a sub-optimal agent's trajectories. Based on these states, the LLM then provides action suggestions and assigns implicit rewards to guide policy refinement. Experiments across standard RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of LLM-based explanations in addressing RL training bottlenecks.

Hua Yan, Heng Tan, Yingxue Zhang et al.

Large-scale human mobility simulation is critical for applications such as urban planning, epidemiology, and transportation analysis. Recent works treat large language models (LLMs) as human agents to simulate realistic mobility behaviors using structured reasoning, but their high computational cost limits scalability. To address this, we design a mobility-aware cache framework named MobCache that leverages reconstructible caches to enable efficient large-scale human mobility simulations. It consists of: (1) a reasoning component that encodes each reasoning step as a latent-space embedding and uses a latent-space evaluator to enable the reuse and recombination of reasoning steps; and (2) a decoding component that employs a lightweight decoder trained with mobility law-constrained distillation to translate latent-space reasoning chains into natural language, thereby improving simulation efficiency while maintaining fidelity. Experiments show that MobCache significantly improves efficiency across multiple dimensions while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art LLM-based methods.