Sjoerd van Straten, Christine Jacob, Marwan Hassanics.LG
Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) enables organizations to forecast future process behavior, such as the next activity and remaining time of ongoing cases. In practice, three conditions cause existing methods to degrade, namely data scarcity, high process entropy and distributional shift. While Foundation Models (FMs), especially Large Language Models (LLMs), offer a new paradigm through broad sequential reasoning, adapting them to multi-task PPM under these conditions remains an open challenge. Existing FM-based approaches either lack mechanisms for handling distributional shift or rely on direct regression heads that can be structurally misaligned with continuous time prediction tasks. This paper introduces D-TAIA (Domain-aware Training and Attention-based Inference Architecture), a framework for a joint next activity and remaining time prediction task via parameter-efficient fine-tuning of an FM backbone. Our approach combines domain-aware triplet loss (DATL) pre-training with FAISS-based nearest neighbor retrieval for remaining time prediction, and adopts the TAIA inference strategy to preserve pre-trained sequential reasoning during fine-tuning. Evaluated across four real-world event logs, D-TAIA consistently shows SOTA or competitive performance compared to a fine-tuned LLM and a recurrent neural network baseline. Ablation studies confirm that techniques from NLP and computer vision can be transferred effectively to PPM with only a 10M-parameter backbone, though component contributions vary by dataset entropy.
Sadia Noor, Seemab Latif, Raja Khurram Shahzad +1cs.AI cs.CL
Modeling dimensional affect in longitudinal text requires distinguishing current affect estimation from future affective change forecasting. Existing approaches often treat each text as an independent observation and apply similar assumptions to both tasks, without testing whether they rely on different information sources. This paper investigates that distinction using longitudinal self-reported ecological essays and feeling-word entries. We propose the Trait--State Affective Prediction (TSAP) framework and its temporal extension E-TSAP for per-text valence and arousal prediction, evaluated on a held-out prediction test set of 1,737 entries from 91 users. We further propose the Affective Change Forecaster Hybrid (ACF-Hybrid) for next-step affective change forecasting, evaluated on a held-out forecasting test set of 46 users. For prediction, E-TSAP achieves composite Pearson correlations of 0.670 for valence and 0.449 for arousal. For forecasting, textual representations perform worse than compact numeric trajectory baselines: the text-inclusive model achieves only r=0.316 for valence and r=0.284 for arousal, whereas a simple prior-state baseline reaches r=0.615 and r=0.670, respectively. ACF-Hybrid, using dimension-specific numeric trajectory features, achieves r=0.659 for valence and $r=0.658$ for arousal. These results show that textual semantics support current affect prediction, whereas future affective change is better captured through prior numeric trajectory dynamics.
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled time series (TS) analysis by jointly modeling numerical observations and textual context through a shared token interface. However, TS tokens and prompt tokens exhibit fundamentally different information structures, making uniform token processing inefficient. In this paper, we study token efficiency in TS language modeling from an asymmetric-token perspective. We show that TS tokens have highly uneven spectral contributions, where many tokens share redundant frequency patterns while a small subset preserves critical temporal evidence. We also observe that prompt-token influence attenuates with model depth, suggesting that full prompt retention across all layers is unnecessary. Based on these findings, we develop an adaptive token budgeting framework that compresses TS tokens via frequency-domain structure and progressively reduces prompt tokens across layers. Experiments across forecasting, classification, imputation, and anomaly detection demonstrate up to \textit{\textbf{7.68$\times$}} inference acceleration and performance gains in \textit{\textbf{78\%}} of evaluated settings, showing the effectiveness of asymmetric token compression for scalable TS foundation models.
Jaeho Kim, Changhun Oh, Seokhyun Lee +2cs.LG cs.AI
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, making them potentially powerful tools for time-series analysis. However, time series lie outside their native textual modality, raising a fundamental question: how should time series be represented so that LLMs can reason about them effectively? Existing work typically serializes raw numerical sequences or fine-tunes pre-trained LLMs on time-series data. These approaches place the burden of extracting temporal structure directly on the LLM, creating a modality mismatch that often degrades performance on long sequences and introduces substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Time-Series-to-Structured-Program representation (T2SP), a deterministic, training-free method that represents a time series as a structured symbolic program. T2SP decomposes time series into trends, periods, and salient events, expressing them in a program-friendly format aligned with the textual and code-like modalities on which LLMs are natively trained. By shifting temporal-structure extraction from the model to the representation itself, T2SP enables off-the-shelf LLMs to leverage their existing reasoning capabilities for time-series understanding. We evaluate T2SP on three reasoning tasks -- editing, captioning, and question answering -- where it consistently improves performance, reduces reasoning time, and lowers failure rates compared with raw-string representations. Our results demonstrate that T2SP provides an effective interface between time series and LLMs.
Ria Mundhra, Gustavo Sato dos Santos, Michael Benediktcs.AI
Time series forecasts are widely used in decision-critical domains, where they are rarely consumed without accompanying explanations. Producing such explanations is usually a manual and costly process, and attempts to automate it using large language models often suffer from hallucination when applied to temporal data. We propose a domain-agnostic framework for grounded natural language explanation generation for time series forecasts, illustrated in Figure 1. The framework consists of three components: (i) extraction of structured explanatory factors from historical analyst-written explanations, (ii) evidence-conditioned explanation generation, and (iii) scalable evaluation for readability, logical consistency, and persuasiveness. The design explicitly constrains generation to verifiable evidence, reducing unsupported claims. We evaluate the framework on a financial forecasting case study involving the NASDAQ-100 index and a freight pricing case study using data from Vortexa. Results show that generated explanations approached analyst-written explanations in terms of readability, consistency and persuasiveness. These findings demonstrate that grounded explanation generation for time series forecasting can be achieved at scale without domain-specific fine-tuning.