arXiv AI

Beyond Tokenization: Direct Timestep Embedding and Contrastive Alignment for Time-Series Question Answering

arXiv:2606. 18986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have given rise to time-series question answering (TSQA), which formulates time-series analysis as natural-language question answering.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

NeST: Neighborhood-aware semantic alignment and temporal modulation for LLM based time series forecasting

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 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
Sep 15

TimeThink: Eliciting Compositional Reasoning in Timeseries Large Language Models

arXiv:2609.13457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Timeseries multimodal large language models (TS-MLLMs) have recently begun leveraging the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for qu...

By Sudarshan Regmi, Arvind Pillai, Yu Yvonne Wu, Yuliang Chen, Bibek Panthi, Tess Z. Griffin, Michael V. Heinz, Lisa Marsch, Nicholas C. Jacobson, Andrew Campbell
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Adapting LLMs to Time Series Forecasting via Temporal Heterogeneity Modeling and Representation Alignment

arXiv:2508. 07195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be effectively adapted for time series forecasting, revealing strong potential beyond natural language tasks.

By Yanru Sun, Emadeldeen Eldele, Zongxia Xie, Yucheng Wang, Wenzhe Niu, Qinghua Hu, Chee Keong Kwoh, Min Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

SAGE: Variate-Wise Semantic Augmentation for Vision-Language Time Series Forecasting

SAGE is a CLIP-based framework that augments vision‑language time series forecasting by incorporating variable‑specific semantic and statistical information. It processes frequency‑enhanced patches and variable tokens through a CLIP text encoder, while a frozen CLIP vision encoder aligns rendered series with temporal representations via a contrastive objective. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on eight long‑term benchmarks and M4, with ablations showing complementary gains from multimodal alignment and variable‑level knowledge.

By Haizhao Fan, Xinyi Le
arXiv AI
Sep 25

TimeBraid: Unifying Time Series and Language for Understanding and Forecasting

TimeBraid is a family of unified models that combine pretrained language models with pretrained time‑series foundation models using interleaved global residual attention layers. The models inherit instruction following, reasoning, and continuous‑signal perception, fusing both modalities into a shared representation space for understanding and generation. The design focuses on aligning representation spaces, grounding language in temporal structure, balancing understanding with generation, and maintaining stable joint optimization, supported by 2.2 M curated series‑text pairs and 4.9 M instruction‑tuning samples. Across diverse benchmarks, TimeBraid competes with larger general‑purpose and task‑specific models.

By Xinyue Wang, Jiacheng Pang, Kun Zhou, Kexin Zhang, Defu Cao, Fan Feng, Faisal, Songyao Jin, Yan Liu, Biwei Huang