# BRIDGE: Bootstrapping Text to Control Time-Series Generation via Multi-Agent Iterative Optimization and Diffusion Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02445 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02445/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 49 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Financial trading and forecasting agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/financial-trading-and-forecasting-agents/)
- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Model collapse from synthetic data](https://mlsanity.com/synth/model-collapse-from-synthetic-data/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02186/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01910/) (2022)
- [Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07815/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Unified Training of Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02592/) (2024)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07820/) (2023)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [Financial Time Series Forecasting with Deep Learning : A Systematic Literature Review: 2005-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13288/) (2019)
- [Monash Time Series Forecasting Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06643/) (2021)
- [Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14735/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-based Time Series Imputation and Forecasting with Structured State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09399/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-TS: Interpretable Diffusion for General Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01742/) (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)
- [UniTime: A Language-Empowered Unified Model for Cross-Domain Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09751/) (2023)
- [TimeVAE: A Variational Auto-Encoder for Multivariate Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08095/) (2021)
- [Can ChatGPT Forecast Stock Price Movements? Return Predictability and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07619/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Evolutionary Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19046/) (2023)
- [Predict, Refine, Synthesize: Self-Guiding Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11494/) (2023)
- [Language Models Still Struggle to Zero-shot Reason about Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11757/) (2024)
- [Non-autoregressive Conditional Diffusion Models for Time Series Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05043/) (2023)
- [Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08627/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [MIRA: Medical Time Series Foundation Model for Real-World Health Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07584/) (2025)
- [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)
- [LLM-Enhanced Multimodal Fusion for Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17966/) (2025)
- [TarDiff: Target-Oriented Diffusion Guidance for Synthetic Electronic Health Record Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17613/) (2025)
- [Causal Time Series Generation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20846/) (2025)
- [Does Acceleration Cause Hidden Instability in Vision Language Models? Uncovering Instance-Level Divergence Through a Large-Scale Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06794/) (2025)
- [Diff-MN: Diffusion Parameterized MoE-NCDE for Continuous Time Series Generation with Irregular Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13534/) (2026)
- [Generating Realistic Multi-Beat ECG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18189/) (2025)
- [Instruction-based Time Series Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01504/) (2025)
- [Privacy-Preserving Generation of Clinical Narratives from Medical Terminologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10882/) (2025)
- [CAD-Tokenizer: Towards Text-based CAD Prototyping via Modality-Specific Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21150/) (2025)
- [Spectral-Aware Text-to-Time Series Generation with Billion-Scale Multimodal Meteorological Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27135/) (2026)
- [Arg-LLaDA: Argument Summarization via Large Language Diffusion Models and Sufficiency-Aware Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19081/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Potential of Probabilistic Transformer for Time Series Modeling: A Report on the ST-PT Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26762/) (2026)
- [UPLOTS: A Unified Pretrained Language Model for Constrained Time-series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10466/) (2026)
- [Represent, Then Generate: Multimodal-Conditioned Time-Series Generation under Irregular Missingness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12592/) (2026)
- [GALA: Generation-Aware Cross-Modal Alignment for Text-to-Time-Series Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13741/) (2026)
- [CodeTS: Verifiable Text-to-Time Series Generation via Executable Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15393/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time-series Generation (TSG) is a prominent research area with broad applications in simulations, data augmentation, and counterfactual analysis. While existing methods have shown promise in unconditional single-domain TSG, real-world applications demand for cross-domain approaches capable of controlled generation tailored to domain-specific constraints and instance-level requirements. In this paper, we argue that text can provide semantic insights, domain information and instance-specific temporal patterns, to guide and improve TSG. We introduce ``Text-Controlled TSG'', a task focused on generating realistic time series by incorporating textual descriptions. To address data scarcity in this setting, we propose a novel LLM-based Multi-Agent framework that synthesizes diverse, realistic text-to-TS datasets. Furthermore, we introduce BRIDGE, a hybrid text-controlled TSG framework that integrates semantic prototypes with text description for supporting domain-level guidance. This approach achieves state-of-the-art generation fidelity on 11 of 12 datasets, and improves controllability by up to 12% on MSE and 6% MAE compared to no text input generation, highlighting its potential for generating tailored time-series data.
