TiMi: Empower Time Series Transformers with Multimodal Mixture of Experts

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Hauptverfasser: Lin, Jiafeng, Wang, Yuxuan, Luo, Huakun, Pei, Zhongyi, Wang, Jianmin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Lin, Jiafeng
Wang, Yuxuan
Luo, Huakun
Pei, Zhongyi
Wang, Jianmin
author_facet Lin, Jiafeng
Wang, Yuxuan
Luo, Huakun
Pei, Zhongyi
Wang, Jianmin
contents Multimodal time series forecasting has garnered significant attention for its potential to provide more accurate predictions than traditional single-modality models by leveraging rich information inherent in other modalities. However, due to fundamental challenges in modality alignment, existing methods often struggle to effectively incorporate multimodal data into predictions, particularly textual information that has a causal influence on time series fluctuations, such as emergency reports and policy announcements. In this paper, we reflect on the role of textual information in numerical forecasting and propose Time series transformers with Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts, TiMi, to unleash the causal reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Concretely, TiMi utilizes LLMs to generate inferences on future developments, which serve as guidance for time series forecasting. To seamlessly integrate both exogenous factors and time series into predictions, we introduce a Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MMoE) module as a lightweight plug-in to empower Transformer-based time series models for multimodal forecasting, eliminating the need for explicit representation-level alignment. Experimentally, our proposed TiMi demonstrates consistent state-of-the-art performance on sixteen real-world multimodal forecasting benchmarks, outperforming advanced baselines while offering both strong adaptability and interpretability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_21693
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TiMi: Empower Time Series Transformers with Multimodal Mixture of Experts
Lin, Jiafeng
Wang, Yuxuan
Luo, Huakun
Pei, Zhongyi
Wang, Jianmin
Machine Learning
Multimodal time series forecasting has garnered significant attention for its potential to provide more accurate predictions than traditional single-modality models by leveraging rich information inherent in other modalities. However, due to fundamental challenges in modality alignment, existing methods often struggle to effectively incorporate multimodal data into predictions, particularly textual information that has a causal influence on time series fluctuations, such as emergency reports and policy announcements. In this paper, we reflect on the role of textual information in numerical forecasting and propose Time series transformers with Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts, TiMi, to unleash the causal reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Concretely, TiMi utilizes LLMs to generate inferences on future developments, which serve as guidance for time series forecasting. To seamlessly integrate both exogenous factors and time series into predictions, we introduce a Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MMoE) module as a lightweight plug-in to empower Transformer-based time series models for multimodal forecasting, eliminating the need for explicit representation-level alignment. Experimentally, our proposed TiMi demonstrates consistent state-of-the-art performance on sixteen real-world multimodal forecasting benchmarks, outperforming advanced baselines while offering both strong adaptability and interpretability.
title TiMi: Empower Time Series Transformers with Multimodal Mixture of Experts
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21693