Plots Unlock Time-Series Understanding in Multimodal Models

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Daswani, Mayank, Bellaiche, Mathias M. J., Wilson, Marc, Ivanov, Desislav, Papkov, Mikhail, Schnider, Eva, Tang, Jing, Lamerigts, Kay, Botea, Gabriela, Sanchez, Michael A., Patel, Yojan, Prabhakara, Shruthi, Shetty, Shravya, Telang, Umesh
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910719528665088
author Daswani, Mayank
Bellaiche, Mathias M. J.
Wilson, Marc
Ivanov, Desislav
Papkov, Mikhail
Schnider, Eva
Tang, Jing
Lamerigts, Kay
Botea, Gabriela
Sanchez, Michael A.
Patel, Yojan
Prabhakara, Shruthi
Shetty, Shravya
Telang, Umesh
author_facet Daswani, Mayank
Bellaiche, Mathias M. J.
Wilson, Marc
Ivanov, Desislav
Papkov, Mikhail
Schnider, Eva
Tang, Jing
Lamerigts, Kay
Botea, Gabriela
Sanchez, Michael A.
Patel, Yojan
Prabhakara, Shruthi
Shetty, Shravya
Telang, Umesh
contents While multimodal foundation models can now natively work with data beyond text, they remain underutilized in analyzing the considerable amounts of multi-dimensional time-series data in fields like healthcare, finance, and social sciences, representing a missed opportunity for richer, data-driven insights. This paper proposes a simple but effective method that leverages the existing vision encoders of these models to "see" time-series data via plots, avoiding the need for additional, potentially costly, model training. Our empirical evaluations show that this approach outperforms providing the raw time-series data as text, with the additional benefit that visual time-series representations demonstrate up to a 90% reduction in model API costs. We validate our hypothesis through synthetic data tasks of increasing complexity, progressing from simple functional form identification on clean data, to extracting trends from noisy scatter plots. To demonstrate generalizability from synthetic tasks with clear reasoning steps to more complex, real-world scenarios, we apply our approach to consumer health tasks - specifically fall detection, activity recognition, and readiness assessment - which involve heterogeneous, noisy data and multi-step reasoning. The overall success in plot performance over text performance (up to an 120% performance increase on zero-shot synthetic tasks, and up to 150% performance increase on real-world tasks), across both GPT and Gemini model families, highlights our approach's potential for making the best use of the native capabilities of foundation models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_02637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Plots Unlock Time-Series Understanding in Multimodal Models
Daswani, Mayank
Bellaiche, Mathias M. J.
Wilson, Marc
Ivanov, Desislav
Papkov, Mikhail
Schnider, Eva
Tang, Jing
Lamerigts, Kay
Botea, Gabriela
Sanchez, Michael A.
Patel, Yojan
Prabhakara, Shruthi
Shetty, Shravya
Telang, Umesh
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
While multimodal foundation models can now natively work with data beyond text, they remain underutilized in analyzing the considerable amounts of multi-dimensional time-series data in fields like healthcare, finance, and social sciences, representing a missed opportunity for richer, data-driven insights. This paper proposes a simple but effective method that leverages the existing vision encoders of these models to "see" time-series data via plots, avoiding the need for additional, potentially costly, model training. Our empirical evaluations show that this approach outperforms providing the raw time-series data as text, with the additional benefit that visual time-series representations demonstrate up to a 90% reduction in model API costs. We validate our hypothesis through synthetic data tasks of increasing complexity, progressing from simple functional form identification on clean data, to extracting trends from noisy scatter plots. To demonstrate generalizability from synthetic tasks with clear reasoning steps to more complex, real-world scenarios, we apply our approach to consumer health tasks - specifically fall detection, activity recognition, and readiness assessment - which involve heterogeneous, noisy data and multi-step reasoning. The overall success in plot performance over text performance (up to an 120% performance increase on zero-shot synthetic tasks, and up to 150% performance increase on real-world tasks), across both GPT and Gemini model families, highlights our approach's potential for making the best use of the native capabilities of foundation models.
title Plots Unlock Time-Series Understanding in Multimodal Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02637