# FLAIRR-TS -- Forecasting LLM-Agents with Iterative Refinement and Retrieval for Time Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19279 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19279/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Financial trading and forecasting agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 9 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Financial trading and forecasting agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/financial-trading-and-forecasting-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (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)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07820/) (2023)
- [LSTPrompt: Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters by Long-Short-Term Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16132/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Role of Textual Prompts in LLM for Time Series Forecasting: an Adapter View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14782/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [KairosAgent: Agentic Time Series Forecasting with Fused Semantic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30002/) (2026)
- [Bridging the Last Mile of Time Series Forecasting with LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02497/) (2026)
- [TimeClaw: A Time-Series AI Agent with Exploratory Execution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10038/) (2026)
- [LLM-based Agents for Forecasting and Prediction: Methods, Training, Evaluation, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23058/) (2026)
- [LLM Agents for Time-Series: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26226/) (2026)
- [MetaCaster: Meta-Harness-Optimized Agent for End-to-End Few-Shot Learning of Lightweight Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23473/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series Forecasting with large languagemodels (LLMs) requires bridging numericalpatterns and natural language. Effective fore-casting on LLM often relies on extensive pre-processing and fine-tuning.Recent studiesshow that a frozen LLM can rival specializedforecasters when supplied with a carefully en-gineered natural-language prompt, but craft-ing such a prompt for each task is itself oner-ous and ad-hoc. We introduce FLAIRR-TS, atest-time prompt optimization framework thatutilizes an agentic system: a Forecaster-agentgenerates forecasts using an initial prompt,which is then refined by a refiner agent, in-formed by past outputs and retrieved analogs.This adaptive prompting generalizes across do-mains using creative prompt templates andgenerates high-quality forecasts without inter-mediate code generation.Experiments onbenchmark datasets show improved accuracyover static prompting and retrieval-augmentedbaselines, approaching the performance ofspecialized prompts.FLAIRR-TS providesa practical alternative to tuning, achievingstrong performance via its agentic approach toadaptive prompt refinement and retrieval.