With the rapid and transformative advances of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, the capabilities of these models in knowledge integration and reasoning have opened new technological pathways for intelligent industrial applications. This review systematically surveys key adaptation techniques, representative application scenarios, and future development trends of LLMs in industrial scenarios. It also provides an integrated overview of their application paradigms and technical characteristics across core industrial processes. Key adaptation techniques for industrial scenarios are first analyzed, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, together with a summary of commonly used evaluation metrics and LLM-based assessment approaches. Representative practices of LLMs are then systematically reviewed across the product lifecycle, covering product design, process planning, production and manufacturing, as well as operation and maintenance. The effectiveness of LLMs in addressing practical industrial problems, facilitating technological innovation, and improving application performance is examined. Finally, major challenges currently encountered in industrial applications of LLMs are identified, including the scarcity of high-quality datasets, limited multimodal fusion capability, insufficient domain specificity, reliability concerns, constrained interpretability, and the lack of standardized evaluation frameworks. Corresponding future research directions are outlined, such as the development of data augmentation and secure sharing mechanisms, the exploration of novel model architectures, and the establishment of intelligent evaluation systems. Overall, this review provides a comprehensive reference for systematic investigations of LLM applications across the entire industrial process and offers theoretical foundations and methodological guidance for both academic research and engineering practice.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances in generic question-answering (QA) but often suffer from domain gaps and outdated knowledge in smart manufacturing (SM). Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based on LLMs has emerged as a potential approach by incorporating an external knowledge base. However, conventional vector-based RAG delivers rapid responses but often returns contextually vague results, while knowledge graph (KG)-based methods offer structured relational reasoning at the expense of scalability and efficiency. To address these challenges, a hybrid KG-Vector RAG framework that systematically integrates structured KG metadata with unstructured vector retrieval is proposed. Firstly, a metadata-enriched KG was constructed from domain corpora by systematically extracting and indexing structured information to capture essential domain-specific relationships. Secondly, semantic alignment was achieved by injecting domain-specific constraints to refine and enhance the contextual relevance of the knowledge representations. Lastly, a layered hybrid retrieval strategy was employed that combined the explicit reasoning capabilities of the KG with the efficient search power of vector-based similarity methods, and the resulting outputs were integrated via prompt engineering to generate comprehensive, context-aware responses. Evaluated on design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) tasks, the proposed approach achieved 77.8% exact match accuracy and 76.5% context precision. This study establishes a new paradigm for industrial LLM systems, which demonstrates that hybrid symbolic-neural architectures can overcome the precision-scalability trade-off in mission-critical manufacturing applications. Experimental results indicated that integrating structured KG information with vector-based retrieval and prompt engineering can enhance retrieval accuracy, contextual relevance, and efficiency in LLM-based Q&A systems for SM.

Product appearance is one of the crucial factors that influence consumers’ purchase decisions. The attractiveness of product appearance is mainly determined by the inherent aesthetics of the design composition related to the arrangement of visual design elements. Hence, it is critical to study and improve the arrangement of visual design elements for product appearance design. Strategies that apply aesthetic design principles to assist designers in effectively arranging visual design elements are widely acknowledged in both academia and industry. However, applying aesthetic design principles relies heavily on the designer’s perception and experience, while it is rather challenging for novice designers. Meanwhile, it is hard to measure and quantify design aesthetics in designing artefacts when designers refer to existing successful designs. In this regard, this study aims to introduce a method that assists designers in applying aesthetic design principles to improve the attractiveness of product appearance. Furthermore, formulas for aesthetic measurement based on aesthetic design principles are also developed, and it makes an early attempt to provide quantified aesthetic measurements of design artefacts. A case study on camera design was conducted to demonstrate the merits of the proposed method where the improved strategies for the camera appearance design offer insights for concept generation in product appearance design based on aesthetic design principles.

In this paper, we propose RNN-Capsule, a capsule model based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for sentiment analysis. For a given problem, one capsule is built for each sentiment category e.g., 'positive' and 'negative'. Each capsule has an attribute, a state, and three modules: representation module, probability module, and reconstruction module. The attribute of a capsule is the assigned sentiment category. Given an instance encoded in hidden vectors by a typical RNN, the representation module builds capsule representation by the attention mechanism. Based on capsule representation, the probability module computes the capsule's state probability. A capsule's state is active if its state probability is the largest among all capsules for the given instance, and inactive otherwise. On two benchmark datasets (i.e., Movie Review and Stanford Sentiment Treebank) and one proprietary dataset (i.e., Hospital Feedback), we show that RNN-Capsule achieves state-of-the-art performance on sentiment classification. More importantly, without using any linguistic knowledge, RNN-Capsule is capable of outputting words with sentiment tendencies reflecting capsules' attributes. The words well reflect the domain specificity of the dataset.

In this paper, we try to predict which category will be less accurately classified compared with other categories in a classification task that involves multiple categories. The categories with poor predicted performance will be identified before any classifiers are trained and additional steps can be taken to address the predicted poor accuracies of these categories. Inspired by the work on query performance prediction in ad-hoc retrieval, we propose to predict classification performance using two measures, namely, category size and category coherence. Our experiments on 20-Newsgroup and Reuters-21578 datasets show that the Spearman rank correlation coefficient between the predicted rank of classification performance and the expected classification accuracy is as high as 0.9.