# TSAQA: Time Series Analysis Question And Answering Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.23204 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23204/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14975/) (2023)
- [Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07815/) (2024)
- [Time Series Forecasting With Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13408/) (2020)
- [The UCR Time Series Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07758/) (2018)
- [Time-MoE: Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Models with Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16040/) (2024)
- [Monash Time Series Forecasting Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06643/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Language Models Still Struggle to Zero-shot Reason about Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11757/) (2024)
- [Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18959/) (2024)
- [Time-MQA: Time Series Multi-Task Question Answering with Context Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01875/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning for Time Series Classification and Extrinsic Regression: A Current Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02515/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Multivariate Time Series Imputation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04059/) (2024)
- [TimeSeriesExam: A time series understanding exam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14752/) (2024)
- [AlphaFin: Benchmarking Financial Analysis with Retrieval-Augmented Stock-Chain Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12582/) (2024)
- [Can LLMs Understand Time Series Anomalies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05440/) (2024)
- [Language in the Flow of Time: Time-Series-Paired Texts Weaved into a Unified Temporal Narrative](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08942/) (2025)
- [IMU2CLIP: Multimodal Contrastive Learning for IMU Motion Sensors from Egocentric Videos and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14395/) (2022)
- [ITFormer: Bridging Time Series and Natural Language for Multi-Modal QA with Large-Scale Multitask Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20093/) (2025)
- [Multivariate Industrial Time Series with Cyber-Attack Simulation: Fault Detection Using an LSTM-based Predictive Data Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06676/) (2016)
- [Large language models can be zero-shot anomaly detectors for time series?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14755/) (2024)
- [A machine learning approach for forecasting hierarchical time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00630/) (2020)
- [SubseasonalClimateUSA: A Dataset for Subseasonal Forecasting and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10399/) (2021)
- [How Can Time Series Analysis Benefit From Multiple Modalities? A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11835/) (2025)
- [TSRBench: A Comprehensive Multi-task Multi-modal Time Series Reasoning Benchmark for Generalist Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18744/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Harnessing Generalist Agents for Contextualized Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05404/) (2026)
- [Heterogeneous Scientific Foundation Model Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27351/) (2026)
- [TS-Skill: A Benchmark for Evaluating Analytical Skills in Time-Series Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24703/) (2026)
- [Towards Verifiable Agentic Data Science: Solving Irregular TSQA Via Tool-Grounded Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15107/) (2026)
- [A Cost-Effective Multimodal LLM Reasoning Framework for Question Answering over Irregular Clinical Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25947/) (2026)
- [From Recognition to Understanding: Unlocking Cognitive Time Series Reasoning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22126/) (2026)
- [WearableQA: A Benchmark for Health Reasoning over Real-World Wearable Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05405/) (2026)
- [T-SMART: Mechanism-Level Attribution for Tool-Augmented Time-Series Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14142/) (2026)
- [TimeEvo: Failure-Driven Self-Evolution of a Time Series Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27277/) (2026)
- [Zero-Shot Time-Series Question Answering via Decoupled Perception and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04942/) (2026)
- [Do Time-Series QA Systems Read the Time Series? Evidence Use and Reasoning Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05686/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series data are integral to critical applications across domains such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and environmental science. While recent work has begun to explore multi-task time series question answering (QA), current benchmarks remain limited to forecasting and anomaly detection tasks. We introduce TSAQA, a novel unified benchmark designed to broaden task coverage and evaluate diverse temporal analysis capabilities. TSAQA integrates six diverse tasks under a single framework ranging from conventional analysis, including anomaly detection and classification, to advanced analysis, such as characterization, comparison, data transformation, and temporal relationship analysis. Spanning 210k samples across 13 domains, the dataset employs diverse formats, including true-or-false (TF), multiple-choice (MC), and a novel puzzling (PZ), to comprehensively assess time series analysis. Zero-shot evaluation demonstrates that these tasks are challenging for current Large Language Models (LLMs): the best-performing commercial LLM, Gemini-2.5-Flash, achieves an average score of only 65.08. Although instruction tuning boosts open-source performance: the best-performing open-source model, LLaMA-3.1-8B, shows significant room for improvement, highlighting the complexity of temporal analysis for LLMs.