# Language in the Flow of Time: Time-Series-Paired Texts Weaved into a Unified Temporal Narrative

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08942/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [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)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07820/) (2023)
- [Financial Time Series Forecasting with Deep Learning : A Systematic Literature Review: 2005-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13288/) (2019)
- [TimeXer: Empowering Transformers for Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19072/) (2024)
- [Deep Time Series Models: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13278/) (2024)
- [TEMPO: Prompt-based Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04948/) (2023)
- [PromptCast: A New Prompt-based Learning Paradigm for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08964/) (2022)
- [Frequency-domain MLPs are More Effective Learners in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06184/) (2023)
- [Are Language Models Actually Useful for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16964/) (2024)
- [FiLM: Frequency improved Legendre Memory Model for Long-term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08897/) (2022)
- [N-HiTS: Neural Hierarchical Interpolation for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12886/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models for Time Series: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01801/) (2024)
- [ChatTS: Aligning Time Series with LLMs via Synthetic Data for Enhanced Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03104/) (2024)
- [ChatTime: A Unified Multimodal Time Series Foundation Model Bridging Numerical and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11376/) (2024)
- [From News to Forecast: Integrating Event Analysis in LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting with Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17515/) (2024)
- [Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18959/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [MTBench: A Multimodal Time Series Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16858/) (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)
- [Empowering Time Series Analysis with Synthetic Data: A Survey and Outlook in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11411/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Fault Tolerance Mechanisms of Large Language Models in Cloud Computing Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12228/) (2025)
- [Breaking Silos: Adaptive Model Fusion Unlocks Better Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18442/) (2025)
- [Research on Large Language Model Cross-Cloud Privacy Protection and Collaborative Training based on Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12226/) (2025)
- [TSAQA: Time Series Analysis Question And Answering Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23204/) (2026)
- [Harnessing Consistency for Robust Test-Time LLM Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13855/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06973/) (2026)
- [Spectral Text Fusion: A Frequency-Aware Approach to Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01588/) (2026)
- [Unlocking the Value of Text: Event-Driven Reasoning and Multi-Level Alignment for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15452/) (2026)
- [ClimateBench-M: A Multi-Modal Climate Data Benchmark with a Simple Generative Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07394/) (2025)
- [Learnable Spatial-Temporal Positional Encoding for Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08309/) (2025)
- [Empowering Time Series Analysis with Large-Scale Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05646/) (2026)
- [Towards Multimodal Time Series Anomaly Detection with Semantic Alignment and Condensed Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21612/) (2026)
- [Harnessing Generalist Agents for Contextualized Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05404/) (2026)
- [Does Text Actually Help? Uncovering and Resolving Text Collapse in Multimodal Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19413/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Language Models with Modality-Specific Experts for Financial Forecasting from Interleaved Sequences of Text and Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19628/) (2025)
- [Continual Low-Rank Adapters for LLM-based Generative Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25093/) (2025)
- [OWLEYE: Zero-Shot Learner for Cross-Domain Graph Data Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19102/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Post-Training Recipes for Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29401/) (2026)
- [Beyond Numerical Time Series: A Unified Benchmark for Multimodal Forecasting with Heterogeneous Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15087/) (2026)
- [PA-RNet: Perturbation-Aware Residual Network for Robust Multimodal Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04750/) (2025)
- [LLM-Integrated Bayesian State Space Models for Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20952/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Multimodal Fusion for Time Series: Text Modalities Need Constrained Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22372/) (2026)
- [Heterogeneous Scientific Foundation Model Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27351/) (2026)
- [Chronicle: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Joint Language and Time Series Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20268/) (2026)
- [LLM as Forecasting Planner: Training-Free Text Conditioning for Time-Series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24892/) (2026)
- [Semantics or Structure? Auditing Text Sensitivity in Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22321/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While many advances in time series models focus exclusively on numerical data, research on multimodal time series, particularly those involving contextual textual information, remains in its infancy. With recent progress in large language models and time series learning, we revisit the integration of paired texts with time series through the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, which posits that representations of different modalities converge to shared spaces. In this context, we identify that time-series-paired texts may naturally exhibit periodic properties that closely mirror those of the original time series. Building on this insight, we propose a novel framework, Texts as Time Series (TaTS), which considers the time-series-paired texts to be auxiliary variables of the time series. TaTS can be plugged into any existing numerical-only time series models and effectively enable them to handle time series data with paired texts. Through extensive experiments on both multimodal time series forecasting and imputation tasks across benchmark datasets with various existing time series models, we demonstrate that TaTS can enhance multimodal predictive performance without modifying model architectures. Our Code is available at https://github.com/iDEA-iSAIL-Lab-UIUC/TaTS.