# Time-VLM: Exploring Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Time Series Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04395 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04395/

## Key facts

- Cited by 63 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Chart understanding and anomaly detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 26 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Chart understanding and anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/chart-understanding-and-anomaly-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02186/) (2022)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01728/) (2023)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07820/) (2023)
- [Non-stationary Transformers: Exploring the Stationarity in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14415/) (2022)
- [Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14735/) (2024)
- [Less Is More: Fast Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Light Sampling-oriented MLP Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01186/) (2022)
- [UniTime: A Language-Empowered Unified Model for Cross-Domain Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09751/) (2023)
- [TimeMixer++: A General Time Series Pattern Machine for Universal Predictive Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16032/) (2024)
- [VisionTS: Visual Masked Autoencoders Are Free-Lunch Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17253/) (2024)
- [Time-FFM: Towards LM-Empowered Federated Foundation Model for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14252/) (2024)
- [Forecasting with time series imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08064/) (2019)
- [Visual Time Series Forecasting: An Image-driven Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09052/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Memory in the Age of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13564/) (2025)
- [TimeXL: Explainable Multi-modal Time Series Prediction with LLM-in-the-Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01013/) (2025)
- [Aurora: Towards Universal Generative Multimodal Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22295/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Science: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13502/) (2025)
- [Multi-modal Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13709/) (2025)
- [How Can Time Series Analysis Benefit From Multiple Modalities? A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11835/) (2025)
- [BEDTime: A Unified Benchmark for Automatically Describing Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05215/) (2025)
- [TS-Reasoner: Aligning Time Series Foundation Models with LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03519/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models for Time Series Forecasting: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14507/) (2025)
- [Multi-Modal View Enhanced Large Vision Models for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24003/) (2025)
- [TS-Agent: Understanding and Reasoning Over Raw Time Series via Iterative Insight Gathering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07432/) (2025)
- [From Images to Signals: Are Large Vision Models Useful for Time Series Analysis?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24030/) (2025)
- [TimeRecipe: A Time-Series Forecasting Recipe via Benchmarking Module Level Effectiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06482/) (2025)
- [Teaching Time Series to See and Speak: Forecasting with Aligned Visual and Textual Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24124/) (2025)
- [ARFBench: Benchmarking Time Series Question Answering Ability for Software Incident Response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21199/) (2026)
- [Eliciting Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Time Series Analysis using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01116/) (2025)
- [MLLM4TS: Leveraging Vision and Multimodal Language Models for General Time-Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07513/) (2025)
- [Overcoming the Modality Gap in Context-Aided Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12451/) (2026)
- [Unlocking the Value of Text: Event-Driven Reasoning and Multi-Level Alignment for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15452/) (2026)
- [TiMi: Empower Time Series Transformers with Multimodal Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21693/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Enhanced Time-Series Forecasting via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07697/) (2025)
- [Empowering Time Series Analysis with Large-Scale Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05646/) (2026)
- [Time Series Reasoning via Process-Verifiable Thinking Data Synthesis and Scheduling for Tailored LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07830/) (2026)
- [Super-Linear: A Lightweight Pretrained Mixture of Linear Experts for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15105/) (2025)
- [Learning to Factorize and Adapt: A Versatile Approach Toward Universal Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12083/) (2026)
- [Visual Reasoning over Time Series via Multi-Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03026/) (2026)
- [TSRouter: Dynamic Modality-Model Selection for Time Series Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08940/) (2026)
- [Non-collective Calibrating Strategy for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03176/) (2025)
- [PA-RNet: Perturbation-Aware Residual Network for Robust Multimodal Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04750/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-thought Reviewing and Correction for Time Series Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22627/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in time series forecasting have explored augmenting models with text or vision modalities to improve accuracy. While text provides contextual understanding, it often lacks fine-grained temporal details. Conversely, vision captures intricate temporal patterns but lacks semantic context, limiting the complementary potential of these modalities. To address this, we propose method, a novel multimodal framework that leverages pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge temporal, visual, and textual modalities for enhanced forecasting. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a Retrieval-Augmented Learner, which extracts enriched temporal features through memory bank interactions; (2) a Vision-Augmented Learner, which encodes time series as informative images; and (3) a Text-Augmented Learner, which generates contextual textual descriptions. These components collaborate with frozen pre-trained VLMs to produce multimodal embeddings, which are then fused with temporal features for final prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Time-VLM achieves superior performance, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios, thereby establishing a new direction for multimodal time series forecasting. Code is available at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/ICML25-TimeVLM.