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:2606. 19413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal time series forecasting, which pairs numerical sequences with domain-relevant textual reports, promises to inject world knowledge into forecasting pipelines.
By Huu Hiep Nguyen, Minh Hoang Nguyen, Dung Nguyen, Hung Le
arXiv:2609.15087v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Most time series forecasting benchmarks remain numerical-centric and provide limited support for evaluating contextual information that shapes real-w...
By Peng Chen, Zhihao Zhuang, Hongzhou Chen, Junhao Huang, Aiping Yang, Mengsen Wu, Yiding Liu, Xilin Dai, Zewei Dong
arXiv:2607. 06973v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a new context-enriched, multimodal time series forecasting benchmark, TimesX.
By Haoxin Liu, Yichen Zhou, Rajat Sen, B. Aditya Prakash, Abhimanyu Das
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:2603. 22372v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal learning have motivated the integration of auxiliary modalities such as text or vision into time series (TS) forecasting.
By Seunghan Lee, Jun Seo, Jaehoon Lee, Sungdong Yoo, Minjae Kim, Tae Yoon Lim, Dongwan Kang, Hwanil Choi, SoonYoung Lee, Wonbin Ahn
arXiv:2602. 01588v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal time series forecasting is crucial in real-world applications, where decisions depend on both numerical data and contextual signals.
By Huu Hiep Nguyen, Minh Hoang Nguyen, Dung Nguyen, Hung Le
arXiv:2608. 13741v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthesizing time series from natural language is emerging as the most expressive form of controllable time series generation.
By Haochen Zhang, Gengwei Zhang, Laura Yao, Nicholas Knoz, Tianlong Chen
arXiv:2507. 19634v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have laid the foundation for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), which unify text, speech, and vision within a single framework.
By Sara Papi, Maike Z\"ufle, Marco Gaido, Beatrice Savoldi, Danni Liu, Ioannis Douros, Luisa Bentivogli, Jan Niehues
NeST is a framework that adapts large language models (LLMs) for continuous time‑series forecasting by creating neighborhood‑aware text prototypes and aligning them with temporal representations through a nearest‑neighbor contrastive objective. It retrieves the most relevant prototypes and uses them to conditionally modulate time‑series features, enabling more effective integration of textual and temporal information. Experiments show that NeST outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on eight benchmarks, reduces MSE by 1.2% for long‑term forecasting, improves zero‑shot forecasting by 4.9%, and boosts R² by 3.3% on a real‑world photovoltaic power forecasting task.
By Jayanie Bogahawatte, Sachith Seneviratne, Maneesha Perera, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv:2602. 12147v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are revolutionizing the forecasting landscape from specific dataset modeling to generalizable task evaluation.
By Zhongzheng Qiao, Sheng Pan, Anni Wang, Viktoriya Zhukova, Yong Liu, Xudong Jiang, Qingsong Wen, Mingsheng Long, Ming Jin, Chenghao Liu
arXiv:2603. 05997v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Irregularly sampled time series (ISTS) are widespread in real-world scenarios, exhibiting asynchronous observations on uneven time intervals across diverse variables.
By Zhi Lei, Chenxi Liu, Hao Miao, Wanghui Qiu, Bin Yang, Chenjuan Guo