A Large Language Model-Empowered Agent for Reliable and Robust Structural Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Jiachen, Geng, Ziheng, Cao, Ran, Cheng, Lu, Bocchini, Paolo, Cheng, Minghui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Jiachen
Geng, Ziheng
Cao, Ran
Cheng, Lu
Bocchini, Paolo
Cheng, Minghui
author_facet Liu, Jiachen
Geng, Ziheng
Cao, Ran
Cheng, Lu
Bocchini, Paolo
Cheng, Minghui
contents Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across diverse open-domain tasks, yet their application in specialized domains such as civil engineering remains largely unexplored. This paper starts bridging this gap by evaluating and enhancing the reliability and robustness of LLMs in structural analysis of beams. Reliability is assessed through the accuracy of correct outputs under repetitive runs of the same problems, whereas robustness is evaluated via the performance across varying load and boundary conditions. A benchmark dataset, comprising eight beam analysis problems, is created to test the Llama-3.3 70B Instruct model. Results show that, despite a qualitative understanding of structural mechanics, the LLM lacks the quantitative reliability and robustness for engineering applications. To address these limitations, a shift is proposed that reframes the structural analysis as code generation tasks. Accordingly, an LLM-empowered agent is developed that (a) integrates chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting to generate accurate OpeeSeesPy code, and (b) automatically executes the code to produce structural analysis results. Experimental results demonstrate that the agent achieves accuracy exceeding 99.0% on the benchmark dataset, exhibiting reliable and robust performance across diverse conditions. Ablation studies highlight the complete example and function usage examples as the primary contributors to the agent's enhanced performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_02938
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Large Language Model-Empowered Agent for Reliable and Robust Structural Analysis
Liu, Jiachen
Geng, Ziheng
Cao, Ran
Cheng, Lu
Bocchini, Paolo
Cheng, Minghui
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across diverse open-domain tasks, yet their application in specialized domains such as civil engineering remains largely unexplored. This paper starts bridging this gap by evaluating and enhancing the reliability and robustness of LLMs in structural analysis of beams. Reliability is assessed through the accuracy of correct outputs under repetitive runs of the same problems, whereas robustness is evaluated via the performance across varying load and boundary conditions. A benchmark dataset, comprising eight beam analysis problems, is created to test the Llama-3.3 70B Instruct model. Results show that, despite a qualitative understanding of structural mechanics, the LLM lacks the quantitative reliability and robustness for engineering applications. To address these limitations, a shift is proposed that reframes the structural analysis as code generation tasks. Accordingly, an LLM-empowered agent is developed that (a) integrates chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting to generate accurate OpeeSeesPy code, and (b) automatically executes the code to produce structural analysis results. Experimental results demonstrate that the agent achieves accuracy exceeding 99.0% on the benchmark dataset, exhibiting reliable and robust performance across diverse conditions. Ablation studies highlight the complete example and function usage examples as the primary contributors to the agent's enhanced performance.
title A Large Language Model-Empowered Agent for Reliable and Robust Structural Analysis
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02938