ZARA: Training-Free Motion Time-Series Reasoning via Evidence-Grounded LLM Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Zechen, Chen, Baiyu, Xue, Hao, Salim, Flora D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Zechen
Chen, Baiyu
Xue, Hao
Salim, Flora D.
author_facet Li, Zechen
Chen, Baiyu
Xue, Hao
Salim, Flora D.
contents Motion sensor time-series are central to Human Activity Recognition (HAR), yet conventional approaches are constrained to fixed activity sets and typically require costly parameter retraining to adapt to new behaviors. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising open-set reasoning capabilities, applying them directly to numerical time-series often leads to hallucinations and weak grounding. To address this challenge, we propose ZARA (Zero-training Activity Reasoning Agents), a knowledge- and retrieval-augmented agentic framework for motion time-series reasoning in a training-free inference setting. Rather than relying on black-box projections, ZARA distills reference data into a statistically grounded textual knowledge base that transforms implicit signal patterns into verifiable natural-language priors. Guided by retrieved evidence, ZARA iteratively selects discriminative cues and performs grounded reasoning over candidate activities. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks show that ZARA generalizes robustly to unseen subjects and across datasets, demonstrating strong transferability across heterogeneous sensor domains. These results mark a step toward trustworthy, plug-and-play motion understanding beyond dataset-specific artifacts. Our code is available at https://github.com/zechenli03/ZARA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_04038
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ZARA: Training-Free Motion Time-Series Reasoning via Evidence-Grounded LLM Agents
Li, Zechen
Chen, Baiyu
Xue, Hao
Salim, Flora D.
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Motion sensor time-series are central to Human Activity Recognition (HAR), yet conventional approaches are constrained to fixed activity sets and typically require costly parameter retraining to adapt to new behaviors. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising open-set reasoning capabilities, applying them directly to numerical time-series often leads to hallucinations and weak grounding. To address this challenge, we propose ZARA (Zero-training Activity Reasoning Agents), a knowledge- and retrieval-augmented agentic framework for motion time-series reasoning in a training-free inference setting. Rather than relying on black-box projections, ZARA distills reference data into a statistically grounded textual knowledge base that transforms implicit signal patterns into verifiable natural-language priors. Guided by retrieved evidence, ZARA iteratively selects discriminative cues and performs grounded reasoning over candidate activities. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks show that ZARA generalizes robustly to unseen subjects and across datasets, demonstrating strong transferability across heterogeneous sensor domains. These results mark a step toward trustworthy, plug-and-play motion understanding beyond dataset-specific artifacts. Our code is available at https://github.com/zechenli03/ZARA.
title ZARA: Training-Free Motion Time-Series Reasoning via Evidence-Grounded LLM Agents
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04038