# DualSG: A Dual-Stream Explicit Semantic-Guided Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21830 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21830/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [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)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07820/) (2023)
- [Long-term Forecasting with TiDE: Time-series Dense Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08424/) (2023)
- [Time-MoE: Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Models with Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16040/) (2024)
- [TFB: Towards Comprehensive and Fair Benchmarking of Time Series Forecasting Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20150/) (2024)
- [Byte Pair Encoding is Suboptimal for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03720/) (2020)
- [TEST: Text Prototype Aligned Embedding to Activate LLM's Ability for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08241/) (2023)
- [A Study of Generative Large Language Model for Medical Research and Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13523/) (2023)
- [Exploring Progress in Multivariate Time Series Forecasting: Comprehensive Benchmarking and Heterogeneity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06119/) (2023)
- [CALF: Aligning LLMs for Time Series Forecasting via Cross-modal Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07300/) (2024)
- [TimeCMA: Towards LLM-Empowered Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Cross-Modality Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01638/) (2024)
- [ChatTime: A Unified Multimodal Time Series Foundation Model Bridging Numerical and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11376/) (2024)
- [Language Models Still Struggle to Zero-shot Reason about Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11757/) (2024)
- [Vector Quantized Time Series Generation with a Bidirectional Prior Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04743/) (2023)
- [DSformer: A Double Sampling Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Long-term Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03274/) (2023)
- [Time Series Forecasting with LLMs: Understanding and Enhancing Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10835/) (2024)
- [A Unified Replay-based Continuous Learning Framework for Spatio-Temporal Prediction on Streaming Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14999/) (2024)
- [Context-Alignment: Activating and Enhancing LLM Capabilities in Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03747/) (2025)
- [Decoding Time Series with LLMs: A Multi-Agent Framework for Cross-Domain Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17462/) (2024)
- [GinAR: An End-To-End Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Model Suitable for Variable Missing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11333/) (2024)
- [LineCap: Line Charts for Data Visualization Captioning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07243/) (2022)
- [Truth-Conditional Captioning of Time Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01839/) (2021)
- [LSR-IGRU: Stock Trend Prediction Based on Long Short-Term Relationships and Improved GRU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08282/) (2024)
- [Time Series Language Model for Descriptive Caption Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01832/) (2025)
- [LLM-PS: Empowering Large Language Models for Time Series Forecasting with Temporal Patterns and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09656/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [TimeMosaic: Temporal Heterogeneity Guided Time Series Forecasting via Adaptive Granularity Patch and Segment-wise Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19406/) (2025)
- [TimeSAF: Towards LLM-Guided Semantic Asynchronous Fusion for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12648/) (2026)
- [Multivariate Time Series Forecasting needs Cross Variable Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05742/) (2026)
- [KAIROS: Unified Training for Universal Non-Autoregressive Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02084/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Patching Is Harder Than It Looks For Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04074/) (2026)
- [HyPASE: Hyperbolic Geometry for Parameter-Efficient Speech Emotion Fine-Tuning Framework for Large Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04351/) (2026)
- [CoRe: Coherence and Relational Alignment for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19670/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multivariate Time Series Forecasting plays a key role in many applications. Recent works have explored using Large Language Models for MTSF to take advantage of their reasoning abilities. However, many methods treat LLMs as end-to-end forecasters, which often leads to a loss of numerical precision and forces LLMs to handle patterns beyond their intended design. Alternatively, methods that attempt to align textual and time series modalities within latent space frequently encounter alignment difficulty. In this paper, we propose to treat LLMs not as standalone forecasters, but as semantic guidance modules within a dual-stream framework. We propose DualSG, a dual-stream framework that provides explicit semantic guidance, where LLMs act as Semantic Guides to refine rather than replace traditional predictions. As part of DualSG, we introduce Time Series Caption, an explicit prompt format that summarizes trend patterns in natural language and provides interpretable context for LLMs, rather than relying on implicit alignment between text and time series in the latent space. We also design a caption-guided fusion module that explicitly models inter-variable relationships while reducing noise and computation. Experiments on real-world datasets from diverse domains show that DualSG consistently outperforms 15 state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating the value of explicitly combining numerical forecasting with semantic guidance.