# TENT: Connect Language Models with IoT Sensors for Zero-Shot Activity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08245 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08245/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04478/) (2021)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [A Simple Baseline for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Pre-trained Vision-language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14757/) (2021)
- [CLIP2Scene: Towards Label-efficient 3D Scene Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04926/) (2023)
- [Attribute Prototype Network for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08290/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15525/) (2023)
- [IMRAM: Iterative Matching with Recurrent Attention Memory for Cross-Modal Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03772/) (2020)
- [MM-Fi: Multi-Modal Non-Intrusive 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Wireless Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10345/) (2023)
- [Elaborative Rehearsal for Zero-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02833/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection for Generalized Zero-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08703/) (2019)
- [mRI: Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation Dataset using mmWave, RGB-D, and Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08394/) (2022)
- [EfficientFi: Towards Large-Scale Lightweight WiFi Sensing via CSI Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04138/) (2022)
- [AirFi: Empowering WiFi-based Passive Human Gesture Recognition to Unseen Environment via Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10285/) (2022)
- [IFSeg: Image-free Semantic Segmentation via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14396/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Large Language Models for Time Series: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01801/) (2024)
- [SensorLLM: Aligning Large Language Models with Motion Sensors for Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10624/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Generative AI and LLM for Video Generation, Understanding, and Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16038/) (2024)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Wearables: A Surveying Tutorial on a Still Challenging Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14452/) (2024)
- [Layout Agnostic Human Activity Recognition in Smart Homes through Textual Descriptions Of Sensor Triggers (TDOST)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12368/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Recognizers for Activities of Daily Living](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01238/) (2024)
- [Limitations in Employing Natural Language Supervision for Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition -- And Ways to Overcome Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12023/) (2024)
- [Using Large Language Models to Compare Explainable Models for Smart Home Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06352/) (2024)
- [Babel: A Scalable Pre-trained Model for Multi-Modal Sensing via Expandable Modality Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17777/) (2024)
- [SensorQA: A Question Answering Benchmark for Daily-Life Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04974/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Next Token: Towards Prompt-Robust Zero-Shot Classification via Efficient Multi-Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03159/) (2025)
- [M4Human: A Large-Scale Multimodal mmWave Radar Benchmark for Human Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12378/) (2025)
- [CLaSP: Learning Concepts for Time-Series Signals from Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08397/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models for Explainable Activity Recognition in Smart Homes: A Critical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16622/) (2025)
- [QuAnTS: Question Answering on Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05124/) (2025)
- [Giving Sensors a Voice: Multimodal JEPA for Semantic Time-Series Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31580/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Foundation Models for Zero-Shot IoT Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19893/) (2024)
- [SysCaps: Language Interfaces for Simulation Surrogates of Complex Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19653/) (2024)
- [HoloLLM: Multisensory Foundation Model for Language-Grounded Human Sensing and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17645/) (2025)
- [Prompting Underestimates LLM Capability for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03464/) (2026)
- [ContextGPT: Infusing LLMs Knowledge into Neuro-Symbolic Activity Recognition Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06586/) (2024)
- [Semantically Encoding Activity Labels for Context-Aware Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07916/) (2025)
- [LaSTR: Language-Driven Time-Series Segment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00725/) (2026)
- [Distribution-Aware Diffusion-LLM for Robust Ultra-Long-Term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23391/) (2026)
- [Expressivity In Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17203/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent achievements in language models have showcased their extraordinary capabilities in bridging visual information with semantic language understanding. This leads us to a novel question: can language models connect textual semantics with IoT sensory signals to perform recognition tasks, e.g., Human Activity Recognition (HAR)? If so, an intelligent HAR system with human-like cognition can be built, capable of adapting to new environments and unseen categories. This paper explores its feasibility with an innovative approach, IoT-sEnsors-language alignmEnt pre-Training (TENT), which jointly aligns textual embeddings with IoT sensor signals, including camera video, LiDAR, and mmWave. Through the IoT-language contrastive learning, we derive a unified semantic feature space that aligns multi-modal features with language embeddings, so that the IoT data corresponds to specific words that describe the IoT data. To enhance the connection between textual categories and their IoT data, we propose supplementary descriptions and learnable prompts that bring more semantic information into the joint feature space. TENT can not only recognize actions that have been seen but also ``guess'' the unseen action by the closest textual words from the feature space. We demonstrate TENT achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot HAR tasks using different modalities, improving the best vision-language models by over 12%.