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Main Authors: Zhang, Zhirui, Pei, Changhua, Gao, Tianyi, Xie, Zhe, Hao, Yibo, Yu, Zhaoyang, Xu, Longlong, Xiao, Tong, Han, Jing, Pei, Dan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06344
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author Zhang, Zhirui
Pei, Changhua
Gao, Tianyi
Xie, Zhe
Hao, Yibo
Yu, Zhaoyang
Xu, Longlong
Xiao, Tong
Han, Jing
Pei, Dan
author_facet Zhang, Zhirui
Pei, Changhua
Gao, Tianyi
Xie, Zhe
Hao, Yibo
Yu, Zhaoyang
Xu, Longlong
Xiao, Tong
Han, Jing
Pei, Dan
contents In the time-series domain, an increasing number of works combine text with temporal data to leverage the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for various downstream time-series understanding tasks. This enables a single model to flexibly perform tasks that previously required specialized models for each domain. However, these methods typically rely on text labels for supervision during training, biasing the model toward textual cues while potentially neglecting the full temporal features. Such a bias can lead to outputs that contradict the underlying time-series context. To address this issue, we construct the EvalTS benchmark, comprising 10 tasks across three difficulty levels, from fundamental temporal pattern recognition to complex real-world reasoning, to evaluate models under more challenging and realistic scenarios. We also propose TimeSense, a multimodal framework that makes LLMs proficient in time-series analysis by balancing textual reasoning with a preserved temporal sense. TimeSense incorporates a Temporal Sense module that reconstructs the input time-series within the model's context, ensuring that textual reasoning is grounded in the time-series dynamics. Moreover, to enhance spatial understanding of time-series data, we explicitly incorporate coordinate-based positional embeddings, which provide each time point with spatial context and enable the model to capture structural dependencies more effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that TimeSense achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, and it particularly outperforms existing methods on complex multi-dimensional time-series reasoning tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06344
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TimeSense:Making Large Language Models Proficient in Time-Series Analysis
Zhang, Zhirui
Pei, Changhua
Gao, Tianyi
Xie, Zhe
Hao, Yibo
Yu, Zhaoyang
Xu, Longlong
Xiao, Tong
Han, Jing
Pei, Dan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
In the time-series domain, an increasing number of works combine text with temporal data to leverage the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for various downstream time-series understanding tasks. This enables a single model to flexibly perform tasks that previously required specialized models for each domain. However, these methods typically rely on text labels for supervision during training, biasing the model toward textual cues while potentially neglecting the full temporal features. Such a bias can lead to outputs that contradict the underlying time-series context. To address this issue, we construct the EvalTS benchmark, comprising 10 tasks across three difficulty levels, from fundamental temporal pattern recognition to complex real-world reasoning, to evaluate models under more challenging and realistic scenarios. We also propose TimeSense, a multimodal framework that makes LLMs proficient in time-series analysis by balancing textual reasoning with a preserved temporal sense. TimeSense incorporates a Temporal Sense module that reconstructs the input time-series within the model's context, ensuring that textual reasoning is grounded in the time-series dynamics. Moreover, to enhance spatial understanding of time-series data, we explicitly incorporate coordinate-based positional embeddings, which provide each time point with spatial context and enable the model to capture structural dependencies more effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that TimeSense achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, and it particularly outperforms existing methods on complex multi-dimensional time-series reasoning tasks.
title TimeSense:Making Large Language Models Proficient in Time-Series Analysis
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06344