Lotus: Learning to Understand Time-series by Learning to Forecast
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
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.
arXiv:2508. 09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance.
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.
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.
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.
SAGE is an end‑to‑end CLIP‑based framework that augments vision‑language time‑series forecasting by jointly modeling temporal, cross‑variable, textual, and visual information. It processes frequency‑enhanced patches and variable tokens through a CLIP text encoder, while gated residual paths inject variable‑specific descriptions and statistical descriptors. A frozen CLIP vision encoder aligns rendered series with temporal representations via a training‑only contrastive objective, enabling multimodal alignment and variable‑level knowledge without using an LLM during inference.