On Languaging a Simulation Engine
This work addresses the problem of automating simulation setup for materials science researchers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing language model capabilities.
The authors tackled the challenge of transforming human language into tailored materials simulations by proposing a Lang2Sim framework, which uses three functionalized language models to enable precise conversion of textual descriptions into executable simulator inputs, demonstrated with a water sorption scenario.
Language model intelligence is revolutionizing the way we program materials simulations. However, the diversity of simulation scenarios renders it challenging to precisely transform human language into a tailored simulator. Here, using three functionalized types of language model, we propose a language-to-simulation (Lang2Sim) framework that enables interactive navigation on languaging a simulation engine, by taking a scenario instance of water sorption in porous matrices. Unlike line-by-line coding of a target simulator, the language models interpret each simulator as an assembly of invariant tool function and its variant input-output pair. Lang2Sim enables the precise transform of textual description by functionalizing and sequentializing the language models of, respectively, rationalizing the tool categorization, customizing its input-output combinations, and distilling the simulator input into executable format. Importantly, depending on its functionalized type, each language model features a distinct processing of chat history to best balance its memory limit and information completeness, thus leveraging the model intelligence to unstructured nature of human request. Overall, this work establishes language model as an intelligent platform to unlock the era of languaging a simulation engine.