CLEAR: Cue Learning using Evolution for Accurate Recognition Applied to Sustainability Data Extraction

Abstract: LLM image recognition is a powerful tool for extracting data from images, but accuracy depends on providing sufficient cues in the prompt - requiring a domain expert for specialized tasks. We introduce Cue Learning using Evolution for Accurate Recognition (CLEAR), which uses a combination of LLMs and evolutionary computation to generate and optimize cues such that recognition of specialized features in images is improved. It achieves this by auto-generating a novel domain-specific representation and then using it to optimize suitable textual cues with a genetic algorithm. We apply CLEAR to the real-world task of identifying sustainability data from interior and exterior images of buildings. We investigate the effects of using a variable-length representation compared to fixed-length and show how LLM consistency can be improved by refactoring from categorical to real-valued estimates. We show that CLEAR enables higher accuracy compared to expert human recognition and human-authored prompts in every task with error rates improved by up to two orders of magnitude and an ablation study evincing solution concision.