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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05950 |
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| _version_ | 1866913078730293248 |
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| author | Sui, Songyuan Xu, Zihang Hu, Xia |
| author_facet | Sui, Songyuan Xu, Zihang Hu, Xia |
| contents | Time series classification (TSC) spans diverse application scenarios, yet labeled data are often scarce, making task-specific training costly and inflexible. Recent reasoning-oriented large language models (LLMs) show promise in understanding temporal patterns, but purely zero-shot usage remains suboptimal. We propose FETA, a multi-agent framework for training-free TSC via exemplar-based in-context reasoning. FETA decomposes a multivariate series into channel-wise subproblems, retrieves a few structurally similar labeled examples for each channel, and leverages a reasoning LLM to compare the query against these exemplars, producing channel-level labels with self-assessed confidences; a confidence-weighted aggregator then fuses all channel decisions. This design eliminates the need for pretraining or fine-tuning, improves efficiency by pruning irrelevant channels and controlling input length, and enhances interpretability through exemplar grounding and confidence estimation. On nine challenging UEA datasets, FETA achieves strong accuracy under a fully training-free setting, surpassing multiple trained baselines. These results demonstrate that a multi-agent in-context reasoning framework can transform LLMs into competitive, plug-and-play TSC solvers without any parameter training. The code is available at https://github.com/SongyuanSui/FETATSC. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_05950 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Training-Free Time Series Classification via In-Context Reasoning with LLM Agents Sui, Songyuan Xu, Zihang Hu, Xia Artificial Intelligence Time series classification (TSC) spans diverse application scenarios, yet labeled data are often scarce, making task-specific training costly and inflexible. Recent reasoning-oriented large language models (LLMs) show promise in understanding temporal patterns, but purely zero-shot usage remains suboptimal. We propose FETA, a multi-agent framework for training-free TSC via exemplar-based in-context reasoning. FETA decomposes a multivariate series into channel-wise subproblems, retrieves a few structurally similar labeled examples for each channel, and leverages a reasoning LLM to compare the query against these exemplars, producing channel-level labels with self-assessed confidences; a confidence-weighted aggregator then fuses all channel decisions. This design eliminates the need for pretraining or fine-tuning, improves efficiency by pruning irrelevant channels and controlling input length, and enhances interpretability through exemplar grounding and confidence estimation. On nine challenging UEA datasets, FETA achieves strong accuracy under a fully training-free setting, surpassing multiple trained baselines. These results demonstrate that a multi-agent in-context reasoning framework can transform LLMs into competitive, plug-and-play TSC solvers without any parameter training. The code is available at https://github.com/SongyuanSui/FETATSC. |
| title | Training-Free Time Series Classification via In-Context Reasoning with LLM Agents |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05950 |