# TimeSense:Making Large Language Models Proficient in Time-Series Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06344/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Time series reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 26 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Time series reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/time-series-reasoning/)

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

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [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)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01728/) (2023)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [ROCKET: Exceptionally fast and accurate time series classification using random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13051/) (2019)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [BLIVA: A Simple Multimodal LLM for Better Handling of Text-Rich Visual Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09936/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Unified Language-Vision Pretraining in LLM with Dynamic Discrete Visual Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04669/) (2023)
- [Time-MQA: Time Series Multi-Task Question Answering with Context Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01875/) (2025)
- [FreDF: Learning to Forecast in the Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02399/) (2024)
- [Temporal Data Meets LLM -- Explainable Financial Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11025/) (2023)
- [Time Series Prediction using Deep Learning Methods in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13461/) (2021)
- [Causal Discovery from Temporal Data: An Overview and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10112/) (2023)
- [Deep Multimodal Learning for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.05396/) (2015)
- [TimeRAG: BOOSTING LLM Time Series Forecasting via Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16643/) (2024)
- [DSTP-RNN: a dual-stage two-phase attention-based recurrent neural networks for long-term and multivariate time series prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07464/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [AlphaCast: A Human Wisdom-LLM Intelligence Co-Reasoning Framework for Interactive Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08947/) (2025)
- [ARFBench: Benchmarking Time Series Question Answering Ability for Software Incident Response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21199/) (2026)
- [LLaTiSA: Towards Difficulty-Stratified Time Series Reasoning from Visual Perception to Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17295/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the time-series domain, an increasing number of works combine text with temporal data to leverage the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for various downstream time-series understanding tasks. This enables a single model to flexibly perform tasks that previously required specialized models for each domain. However, these methods typically rely on text labels for supervision during training, biasing the model toward textual cues while potentially neglecting the full temporal features. Such a bias can lead to outputs that contradict the underlying time-series context. To address this issue, we construct the EvalTS benchmark, comprising 10 tasks across three difficulty levels, from fundamental temporal pattern recognition to complex real-world reasoning, to evaluate models under more challenging and realistic scenarios. We also propose TimeSense, a multimodal framework that makes LLMs proficient in time-series analysis by balancing textual reasoning with a preserved temporal sense. TimeSense incorporates a Temporal Sense module that reconstructs the input time-series within the model's context, ensuring that textual reasoning is grounded in the time-series dynamics. Moreover, to enhance spatial understanding of time-series data, we explicitly incorporate coordinate-based positional embeddings, which provide each time point with spatial context and enable the model to capture structural dependencies more effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that TimeSense achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, and it particularly outperforms existing methods on complex multi-dimensional time-series reasoning tasks.