arXiv AI

VLT: A Vision-Language-Time Series Multimodal Foundation Model for Industrial Intelligence

arXiv:2607. 14510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial time series serve as the foundation for Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) to ensure the reliability and safety of industrial equipment such as aero-engines.

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
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 AI
Aug 25

Time-Series Retrieval for Grounding Multimodal Language Models in Remaining Useful Life Prediction

The paper explores remaining useful life (RUL) estimation using multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that are grounded through time‑series retrieval. It proposes a framework that retrieves historically similar degradation segments, combines them with the test trajectory into a visual comparison artifact, and processes this via a structured multimodal prompt. Experiments on the FD001 partition of the C‑MAPSS benchmark show that retrieval consistently improves RUL prediction, with greater benefits for larger MLLMs, while also revealing current limitations in practical prognostics and health management (PHM) settings.

By Valeriu Dimidov, Rapha\"el Frank
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Multi-Modal Time Series Prediction via Mixture of Modulated Experts

The paper introduces Expert Modulation, a novel approach for multi‑modal time series prediction that conditions both expert routing and computation on textual signals, thereby providing direct cross‑modal control over expert behavior. Unlike previous methods that rely on token‑level fusion, this mechanism avoids mixing temporal patches with language tokens in a shared embedding space, which can be problematic when high‑quality time‑text pairs are scarce or when time series characteristics vary widely. Experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that Expert Modulation yields strong improvements over existing multi‑modal forecasting techniques.

By Lige Zhang, Ali Maatouk, Jialin Chen, Karthik Charan Konduri, Leandros Tassiulas, Rex Ying
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Generalized Multimodal Foundation Model

The paper introduces a generalized multimodal foundation model that can handle arbitrary combinations of modalities and prediction tasks. It trains on large-scale synthetic multimodal datasets with diverse causal structures to learn transferable multimodal correlations. Experiments on 18 real-world datasets across 12 modalities and 11 tasks show competitive performance compared to specialized models without task-specific adaptation.

By Huizi Cui, Zongbo Han, Chenggong Ding, Naichuan Xiao, Jialong Yang, Jingdong Chen, Guangyu Wang, Qinghua Hu, Changqing Zhang