mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series

arXiv 2403.07815 ↗First posted 12 Mar 2024cs.LG cs.AIcited by 712

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Cited by 31 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Chronos, a simple yet effective framework for pretrained probabilistic time series models. Chronos tokenizes time series values using scaling and quantization into a fixed vocabulary and trains existing transformer-based language model architectures on these tokenized time series via the cross-entropy loss. We pretrained Chronos models based on the T5 family (ranging from 20M to 710M parameters) on a large collection of publicly available datasets, complemented by a synthetic dataset that we generated via Gaussian processes to improve generalization. In a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 42 datasets, and comprising both classical local models and deep learning methods, we show that Chronos models: (a) significantly outperform other methods on datasets that were part of the training corpus; and (b) have comparable and occasionally superior zero-shot performance on new datasets, relative to methods that were trained specifically on them. Our results demonstrate that Chronos models can leverage time series data from diverse domains to improve zero-shot accuracy on unseen forecasting tasks, positioning pretrained models as a viable tool to greatly simplify forecasting pipelines.

Key facts. Cited by 712 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 50 of its 91 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

Builds on

50 of 91 references.

References · 50

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
  4. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
  5. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
  6. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
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  8. 2017mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimizationcited by 5,155
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  10. 2016Pointer Sentinel Mixture Modelscited by 2,992
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38 more
  1. 2023FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioningcited by 2,551
  2. 2023A Survey of Large Language Modelscited by 2,537
  3. 2020The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modelingcited by 2,346
  4. 2022A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformerscited by 1,981
  5. 2016WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audiocited by 1,710
  6. 2022Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decodingcited by 1,615
  7. 2018Hierarchical Neural Story Generationcited by 1,182
  8. 2022TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysiscited by 1,030
  9. 2022LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scalecited by 881
  10. 2019N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecastingcited by 744
  11. 2023Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Modelscited by 680
  12. 2023A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecastingcited by 650
  13. 2019Conformalized Quantile Regressioncited by 620
  14. 2024Unified Training of Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformerscited by 588
  15. 2023Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasterscited by 491
  16. 2024MOMENT: A Family of Open Time-series Foundation Modelscited by 453
  17. 2023AdaLoRA: Adaptive Budget Allocation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuningcited by 337
  18. 2021Autoregressive Denoising Diffusion Models for Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecastingcited by 332
  19. 2021Monash Time Series Forecasting Archivecited by 256
  20. 2017Beam Search Strategies for Neural Machine Translationcited by 232
  21. 2017A Multi-Horizon Quantile Recurrent Forecastercited by 211
  22. 2023Large Language Models as General Pattern Machinescited by 196
  23. 2022PromptCast: A New Prompt-based Learning Paradigm for Time Series Forecastingcited by 170
  24. 2022N-HiTS: Neural Hierarchical Interpolation for Time Series Forecastingcited by 146
  25. 2022A Length-Extrapolatable Transformercited by 123
  26. 2023LargeST: A Benchmark Dataset for Large-Scale Traffic Forecastingcited by 116
  27. 2023SimMTM: A Simple Pre-Training Framework for Masked Time-Series Modelingcited by 112
  28. 2021Scale Efficiently: Insights from Pre-training and Fine-tuning Transformerscited by 105
  29. 2023Lag-Llama: Towards Foundation Models for Probabilistic Time Series Forecastingcited by 102
  30. 2023ForecastPFN: Synthetically-Trained Zero-Shot Forecastingcited by 102
  31. 2013Structure Discovery in Nonparametric Regression through Compositional Kernel Searchcited by 86
  32. 2023Predict, Refine, Synthesize: Self-Guiding Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Forecastingcited by 86
  33. 2021Domain Adaptation for Time Series Forecasting via Attention Sharingcited by 68
  34. 2021Neural Contextual Anomaly Detection for Time Seriescited by 42
  35. 2023BuildingsBench: A Large-Scale Dataset of 900K Buildings and Benchmark for Short-Term Load Forecastingcited by 26
  36. 2020The Effectiveness of Discretization in Forecasting: An Empirical Study on Neural Time Series Modelscited by 18
  37. 2021Deep Explicit Duration Switching Models for Time Seriescited by 17
  38. 2020Zero-shot and few-shot time series forecasting with ordinal regression recurrent neural networkscited by 10

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 88; 2025: 255; 2026: 369.

712 papers.

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  1. 2024Time-MoE: Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Models with Mixture of Expertscited by 280
  2. 2025TabICL: A Tabular Foundation Model for In-Context Learning on Large Datacited by 267
  3. 2024Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Surveycited by 234
  4. 2024Deep Time Series Models: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmarkcited by 191
  5. 2024GIFT-Eval: A Benchmark For General Time Series Forecasting Model Evaluationcited by 188
  6. 2025Sundial: A Family of Highly Capable Time Series Foundation Modelscited by 168
  7. 2024Are Language Models Actually Useful for Time Series Forecasting?cited by 163
  8. 2025Chronos-2: From Univariate to Universal Forecastingcited by 158
  9. 2025TiRex: Zero-Shot Forecasting Across Long and Short Horizons with Enhanced In-Context Learningcited by 107
  10. 2024Moirai-MoE: Empowering Time Series Foundation Models with Sparse Mixture of Expertscited by 88
  11. 2024VisionTS: Visual Masked Autoencoders Are Free-Lunch Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasterscited by 87
  12. 2024Timer-XL: Long-Context Transformers for Unified Time Series Forecastingcited by 83
38 more
  1. 2025Time-MQA: Time Series Multi-Task Question Answering with Context Enhancementcited by 74
  2. 2024Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysiscited by 65
  3. 2024PaPaGei: Open Foundation Models for Optical Physiological Signalscited by 64
  4. 2025Test-time regression: a unifying framework for designing sequence models with associative memorycited by 63
  5. 2025Moirai 2.0: When Less Is More for Time Series Forecastingcited by 59
  6. 2025TAB: Unified Benchmarking of Time Series Anomaly Detection Methodscited by 58
  7. 2024Scaling Wearable Foundation Modelscited by 57
  8. 2025fev-bench: A Realistic Benchmark for Time Series Forecastingcited by 52
  9. 2025MTBench: A Multimodal Time Series Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning and Question Answeringcited by 50
  10. 2025From Tables to Time: Extending TabPFN-v2 to Time Series Forecastingcited by 49
  11. 2024TimeSeriesExam: A time series understanding examcited by 47
  12. 2024Retrieval Augmented Time Series Forecastingcited by 40
  13. 2025TimeXL: Explainable Multi-modal Time Series Prediction with LLM-in-the-Loopcited by 39
  14. 2025TS-RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Time Series Foundation Models are Stronger Zero-Shot Forecastercited by 36
  15. 2024SensorLLM: Aligning Large Language Models with Motion Sensors for Human Activity Recognitioncited by 35
  16. 2024Gradient-Free Generation for Hard-Constrained Systemscited by 35
  17. 2025Pulse-PPG: An Open-Source Field-Trained PPG Foundation Model for Wearable Applications Across Lab and Field Settingscited by 35
  18. 2024TimeDiT: General-purpose Diffusion Transformers for Time Series Foundation Modelcited by 33
  19. 2025TimeCAP: Learning to Contextualize, Augment, and Predict Time Series Events with Large Language Model Agentscited by 33
  20. 2024Towards a General Time Series Forecasting Model with Unified Representation and Adaptive Transfercited by 31
  21. 2024In-Context Fine-Tuning for Time-Series Foundation Modelscited by 31
  22. 2024Large language models can be zero-shot anomaly detectors for time series?cited by 30
  23. 2024Toward Foundation Model for Multivariate Wearable Sensing of Physiological Signalscited by 29
  24. 2024TS-Reasoner: Domain-Oriented Time Series Inference Agents for Reasoning and Automated Analysiscited by 28
  25. 2025LightGTS: A Lightweight General Time Series Forecasting Modelcited by 28
  26. 2025Aurora: Towards Universal Generative Multimodal Time Series Forecastingcited by 28
  27. 2025TimePFN: Effective Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Synthetic Datacited by 27
  28. 2024Population Transformer: Learning Population-level Representations of Neural Activitycited by 26
  29. 2024Enhancing Foundation Models for Time Series Forecasting via Wavelet-based Tokenizationcited by 26
  30. 2025Harnessing Vision Models for Time Series Analysis: A Surveycited by 26
  31. 2024SMART: Scalable Multi-agent Real-time Motion Generation via Next-token Predictioncited by 25
  32. 2025OLinear: A Linear Model for Time Series Forecasting in Orthogonally Transformed Domaincited by 25
  33. 2025Kronos: A Foundation Model for the Language of Financial Marketscited by 25
  34. 2026It's TIME: Towards the Next Generation of Time Series Forecasting Benchmarkscited by 25
  35. 2026Timer-S1: A Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Model with Serial Scalingcited by 24
  36. 2024Empowering Time Series Analysis with Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 23
  37. 2025FinTSB: A Comprehensive and Practical Benchmark for Financial Time Series Forecastingcited by 23
  38. 2025Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Science: A Tutorial and Surveycited by 23

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