# Time Series Language Model for Descriptive Caption Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01832/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07815/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [Neural Module Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02799/) (2015)
- [AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12995/) (2023)
- [Entity, Relation, and Event Extraction with Contextualized Span Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03546/) (2019)
- [Is GPT-3 a Good Data Annotator?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10450/) (2022)
- [1D Convolutional Neural Networks and Applications: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03554/) (2019)
- [Set Functions for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12064/) (2019)
- [HIBERT: Document Level Pre-training of Hierarchical Bidirectional Transformers for Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06566/) (2019)
- [Deeper Text Understanding for IR with Contextual Neural Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09217/) (2019)
- [Text Classification via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08377/) (2023)
- [Planning with Learned Entity Prompts for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07606/) (2021)
- [RelationPrompt: Leveraging Prompts to Generate Synthetic Data for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09101/) (2022)
- [Learning to Retrieve In-Context Examples for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07164/) (2023)
- [Global-to-Local Neural Networks for Document-Level Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10359/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Transformer Based Model for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15350/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11575/) (2025)
- [How Can Time Series Analysis Benefit From Multiple Modalities? A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11835/) (2025)
- [Empowering Time Series Analysis with Synthetic Data: A Survey and Outlook in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11411/) (2025)
- [BEDTime: A Unified Benchmark for Automatically Describing Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05215/) (2025)
- [DualSG: A Dual-Stream Explicit Semantic-Guided Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21830/) (2025)
- [QuAnTS: Question Answering on Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05124/) (2025)
- [TeleDoCTR: Domain-Specific and Contextual Troubleshooting for Telecommunications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00691/) (2026)
- [From Time Series Analysis to Question Answering: A Survey in the LLM Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11512/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Multi-Agent Weather Captioning via Text Gradient Descent: A Training-Free Approach with Consensus-Aware Gradient Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21673/) (2026)
- [GALA: Generation-Aware Cross-Modal Alignment for Text-to-Time-Series Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13741/) (2026)
- [LineupRL: Verifiable Reinforcement Learning for Time Series Captioning via Caption-to-Series Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01800/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The automatic generation of representative natural language descriptions for observable patterns in time series data enhances interpretability, simplifies analysis and increases cross-domain utility of temporal data. While pre-trained foundation models have made considerable progress in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), their application to time series analysis has been hindered by data scarcity. Although several large language model (LLM)-based methods have been proposed for time series forecasting, time series captioning is under-explored in the context of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce TSLM, a novel time series language model designed specifically for time series captioning. TSLM operates as an encoder-decoder model, leveraging both text prompts and time series data representations to capture subtle temporal patterns across multiple phases and generate precise textual descriptions of time series inputs. TSLM addresses the data scarcity problem in time series captioning by first leveraging an in-context prompting synthetic data generation, and second denoising the generated data via a novel cross-modal dense retrieval scoring applied to time series-caption pairs. Experimental findings on various time series captioning datasets demonstrate that TSLM outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches from multiple data modalities by a significant margin.