mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Towards Time Series Reasoning with LLMs

arXiv 2409.11376 ↗First posted 17 Sep 2024cs.LGcited by 37

On the map: LLM reasoning → Time series reasoning

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled numerous advances in understanding and reasoning in domains like vision, but we have not yet seen this broad success for time-series. Although prior works on time-series MLLMs have shown promising performance in time-series forecasting, very few works show how an LLM could be used for time-series reasoning in natural language. We propose a novel multi-modal time-series LLM approach that learns generalizable information across various domains with powerful zero-shot performance. First, we train a lightweight time-series encoder on top of an LLM to directly extract time-series information. Then, we fine-tune our model with chain-of-thought augmented time-series tasks to encourage the model to generate reasoning paths. We show that our model learns a latent representation that reflects specific time-series features (e.g. slope, frequency), as well as outperforming GPT-4o on a set of zero-shot reasoning tasks on a variety of domains.

Key facts. Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Time series reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 15 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2024.

Builds on

15 of 24 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Language Models Still Struggle to Zero-shot Reason about Time Series17 Apr

Other references · 14

  1. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
  2. 2023Mistral 7Bcited by 3,164
  3. 2023InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuningcited by 2,876
  4. 2022A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformerscited by 2,039
  5. 2023A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 909
  6. 2023Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Modelscited by 700
  7. 2023One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LMcited by 632
  8. 2022Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 596
  9. 2023Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasterscited by 500
  10. 2023LLM4TS: Aligning Pre-Trained LLMs as Data-Efficient Time-Series Forecasterscited by 129
  11. 2023Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learnerscited by 118
  12. 2024Large Language Models for Time Series: A Surveycited by 114
2 more
  1. 2023Multimodal LLMs for health grounded in individual-specific datacited by 49
  2. 2023Demystifying Embedding Spaces using Large Language Modelscited by 17

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 24; 2026: 10.

37 papers.

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  1. 2024ChatTS: Aligning Time Series with LLMs via Synthetic Data for Enhanced Understanding and Reasoningcited by 103
  2. 2025Moirai 2.0: When Less Is More for Time Series Forecastingcited by 69
  3. 2025OpenTSLM: Time-Series Language Models for Reasoning over Multivariate Medical Text- and Time-Series Datacited by 36
  4. 2024A Picture is Worth A Thousand Numbers: Enabling LLMs Reason about Time Series via Visualizationcited by 33
  5. 2025A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Modelscited by 21
  6. 2025T2S: High-resolution Time Series Generation with Text-to-Series Diffusion Modelscited by 20
  7. 2025Can Slow-thinking LLMs Reason Over Time? Empirical Studies in Time Series Forecastingcited by 20
  8. 2025Time-IMM: A Dataset and Benchmark for Irregular Multimodal Multivariate Time Seriescited by 19
  9. 2025Achieving Time Series Reasoning Requires Rethinking Model Design, Tasks Formulation, and Evaluationcited by 17
  10. 2025Empowering Time Series Analysis with Synthetic Data: A Survey and Outlook in the Era of Foundation Modelscited by 15
  11. 2025BEDTime: A Unified Benchmark for Automatically Describing Time Seriescited by 12
  12. 2025TS-Reasoner: Aligning Time Series Foundation Models with LLM Reasoningcited by 12
25 more
  1. 2026Position: Beyond Model-Centric Prediction -- Agentic Time Series Forecastingcited by 9
  2. 2026MemCast: Memory-Driven Time Series Forecasting with Experience-Conditioned Reasoningcited by 9
  3. 2025TempoGPT: Enhancing Time Series Reasoning via Quantizing Embeddingcited by 7
  4. 2025Chat-TS: Enhancing Multi-Modal Reasoning Over Time-Series and Natural Language Datacited by 7
  5. 2026STReasoner: Empowering LLMs for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Time Series via Spatial-Aware Reinforcement Learningcited by 7
  6. 2024EF-LLM: Energy Forecasting LLM with AI-assisted Automation, Enhanced Sparse Prediction, Hallucination Detectioncited by 6
  7. 2026ARFBench: Benchmarking Time Series Question Answering Ability for Software Incident Responsecited by 6
  8. 2025Using LLMs for Late Multimodal Sensor Fusion for Activity Recognitioncited by 5
  9. 2025Reasoning on Time-Series for Financial Technical Analysiscited by 5
  10. 2026Adaptive Time Series Reasoning via Segment Selectioncited by 4
  11. 2026FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Modelscited by 4
  12. 2025Investigating Compositional Reasoning in Time Series Foundation Modelscited by 3
  13. 2025Large Language models for Time Series Analysis: Techniques, Applications, and Challengescited by 3
  14. 2025Multimodal Language Models with Modality-Specific Experts for Financial Forecasting from Interleaved Sequences of Text and Time Seriescited by 2
  15. 2025Towards Interpretable and Trustworthy Time Series Reasoning: A BlueSky Visioncited by 2
  16. 2026Dr-CiK: A Benchmark testing Deep Research for Context-Aided Forecastingcited by 2
  17. 2025Causal Graph Fuzzy LLMs: A First Introduction and Applications in Time Series Forecastingcited by 1
  18. 2025Chain-of-thought Reviewing and Correction for Time Series Question Answeringcited by 1
  19. 2026TS-Skill: A Benchmark for Evaluating Analytical Skills in Time-Series Question Answeringcited by 1
  20. 2025Human-AI Collaborative Bot Detection in MMORPGscited by 0
  21. 2025DiffNator: Generating Structured Explanations of Time-Series Differencescited by 0
  22. 2025Can VLM Pseudo-Labels Train a Time-Series QA Model That Outperforms the VLM?cited by 0
  23. 2025TS-HINT: Enhancing Semiconductor Time Series Regression Using Attention Hints From Large Language Model Reasoningcited by 0
  24. 2026Continuity and Ordinality Matter: Constraining Time Series Tokens for Effective Time Series Analysis with Large Language Modelscited by 0
  25. 2026ReasonCast: Towards Explainable Time Series Forecasting with Reasoningcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Thoth: Mid-Training Bridges LLMs to Time Series Understanding
  2. 2025When LLM Meets Time Series: Can LLMs Perform Multi-Step Time Series Reasoning and Inference
  3. 2025TsLLM: Augmenting LLMs for General Time Series Understanding and Prediction
  4. 2026TimeSeriesExamAgent: Creating Time Series Reasoning Benchmarks at Scale
  5. 2026From Recognition to Understanding: Unlocking Cognitive Time Series Reasoning with LLMs
  6. 2025Enhancing LLM Reasoning for Time Series Classification by Tailored Thinking and Fused Decision
  7. 2025Fusing Large Language Models with Temporal Transformers for Time Series Forecasting
  8. 2024Implicit Reasoning in Deep Time Series Forecasting