arXiv Machine Learning

Rethinking Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting Evaluation

arXiv:2607. 06973v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a new context-enriched, multimodal time series forecasting benchmark, TimesX.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

TiMi: Empower Time Series Transformers with Multimodal Mixture of Experts

The paper introduces TiMi, a framework that enhances time series transformers with a Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MMoE) module to incorporate multimodal data, especially textual information, into forecasting. TiMi leverages large language models to generate future inferences that guide predictions, eliminating the need for explicit representation alignment. Experiments show TiMi achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on sixteen real‑world multimodal forecasting benchmarks, outperforming advanced baselines while maintaining adaptability and interpretability.

By Jiafeng Lin, Yuxuan Wang, Huakun Luo, Jianmin Wang, Zhongyi Pei
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

Overcoming the Modality Gap in Context-Aided Forecasting

arXiv:2603. 12451v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Context-aided forecasting (CAF) holds promise for integrating domain knowledge and forward-looking information, enabling AI systems to surpass traditional statistical methods.

By Vincent Zhihao Zheng, \'Etienne Marcotte, Arjun Ashok, Andrew Robert Williams, Lijun Sun, Alexandre Drouin, Valentina Zantedeschi
arXiv AI
Sep 12

When Does Text Inform? Benchmarking Information-Theoretic Metrics for Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting

The paper introduces a synthetic benchmark for multimodal time‑series forecasting that evaluates how well text annotations contribute to predictions. By generating controlled signals with semantically correct, incorrect, and irrelevant annotations, the authors can precisely measure the true information content. Six mutual‑information estimators (KSG, MINE, InfoNCE, CCA, PID, and V‑information) are tested, all correctly ranking useful annotations and enabling annotation auditing without model training. The benchmark also highlights each estimator’s limitations and validates findings on seven real datasets, providing practical guidelines for metric implementation.

By Emma Andrews, Gianmarco Mengaldo
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

ChronoSteer: Bridging Large Language Model and Time Series Foundation Model via Synthetic Cross-Modal Alignment Dataset

ChronoSteer is a decoupled agentic framework that bridges large language models and time series foundation models by learning cross‑modal alignment from synthetic paired supervision. It converts textual events into revision instructions that steer a frozen time‑series model, discretizes these instructions into a compact codebook to reduce semantic divergence, and then refines the predictions with a two‑stage training strategy. The authors also release a leakage‑controlled multimodal benchmark and report a 25.8% improvement in zero‑shot prediction accuracy over the unimodal backbone.

By Chengsen Wang, Qi Qi, Zhongwen Rao, Lujia Pan, Jingyu Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

WorldTS: World Modeling for Multimodal Covariate-aware Time Series Forecasting

WorldTS is a new forecasting framework that models latent dynamics conditioned on multimodal covariates to improve time‑series prediction. It uses a two‑stage training process: first learning latent state dynamics from historical data and covariates, then training a decoder to map predicted latent states back to future observations. Experiments on 21 real‑world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

By Yuhan Zhu, Xiangfei Qiu, Hanyin Cheng, Wangmeng Shen, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang, Jilin Hu, Christian S. Jensen