LatticeWorld: A Multimodal Large Language Model-Empowered Framework for Interactive Complex World Generation

Recent research has been increasingly focusing on developing 3D world models that simulate complex real-world scenarios. World models have found broad applications across various domains, including embodied AI, autonomous driving, entertainment, etc. A more realistic simulation with accurate physics will effectively narrow the sim-to-real gap and allow us to gather rich information about the real world conveniently. While traditional manual modeling has enabled the creation of virtual 3D scenes, modern approaches have leveraged advanced machine learning algorithms for 3D world generation, with most recent advances focusing on generative methods that can create virtual worlds based on user instructions. This work explores such a research direction by proposing LatticeWorld, a simple yet effective 3D world generation framework that streamlines the industrial production pipeline of 3D environments. LatticeWorld leverages lightweight LLMs (LLaMA-2-7B) alongside the industry-grade rendering engine (e.g., Unreal Engine 5) to generate a dynamic environment. Our proposed framework accepts textual descriptions and visual instructions as multimodal inputs and creates large-scale 3D interactive worlds with dynamic agents, featuring competitive multi-agent interaction, high-fidelity physics simulation, and real-time rendering. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate LatticeWorld, showing that it achieves superior accuracy in scene layout generation and visual fidelity. Moreover, LatticeWorld achieves over a $90\times$ increase in industrial production efficiency while maintaining high creative quality compared with traditional manual production methods. Our demo video is available at https://youtu.be/8VWZXpERR18

A Systematic Review on Prompt Engineering in Large Language Models for K-12 STEM Education

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance K-12 STEM education by improving both teaching and learning processes. While previous studies have shown promising results, there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding how LLMs are effectively applied, specifically through prompt engineering-the process of designing prompts to generate desired outputs. To address this gap, our study investigates empirical research published between 2021 and 2024 that explores the use of LLMs combined with prompt engineering in K-12 STEM education. Following the PRISMA protocol, we screened 2,654 papers and selected 30 studies for analysis. Our review identifies the prompting strategies employed, the types of LLMs used, methods of evaluating effectiveness, and limitations in prior work. Results indicate that while simple and zero-shot prompting are commonly used, more advanced techniques like few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting have demonstrated positive outcomes for various educational tasks. GPT-series models are predominantly used, but smaller and fine-tuned models (e.g., Blender 7B) paired with effective prompt engineering outperform prompting larger models (e.g., GPT-3) in specific contexts. Evaluation methods vary significantly, with limited empirical validation in real-world settings.