Prioritizing Alignment Paradigms over Task-Specific Model Customization in Time-Series LLMs

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled unprecedented capabilities for time-series reasoning in diverse real-world applications, including medical, financial, and spatio-temporal domains. However, existing approaches typically focus on task-specific model customization, such as forecasting and anomaly detection, while overlooking the data itself, referred to as time-series primitives, which are essential for in-depth reasoning. This position paper advocates a fundamental shift in approaching time-series reasoning with LLMs: prioritizing alignment paradigms grounded in the intrinsic primitives of time series data over task-specific model customization. This realignment addresses the core limitations of current time-series reasoning approaches, which are often costly, inflexible, and inefficient, by systematically accounting for intrinsic structure of data before task engineering. To this end, we propose three alignment paradigms: Injective Alignment, Bridging Alignment, and Internal Alignment, which are emphasized by prioritizing different aspects of time-series primitives: domain, characteristic, and representation, respectively, to activate time-series reasoning capabilities of LLMs to enable economical, flexible, and efficient reasoning. We further recommend that practitioners adopt an alignment-oriented method to avail this instruction to select an appropriate alignment paradigm. Additionally, we categorize relevant literature into these alignment paradigms and outline promising research directions.

From Chaos to Clarity: Time Series Anomaly Detection in Astronomical Observations

With the development of astronomical facilities, large-scale time series data observed by these facilities is being collected. Analyzing anomalies in these astronomical observations is crucial for uncovering potential celestial events and physical phenomena, thus advancing the scientific research process. However, existing time series anomaly detection methods fall short in tackling the unique characteristics of astronomical observations where each star is inherently independent but interfered by random concurrent noise, resulting in a high rate of false alarms. To overcome the challenges, we propose AERO, a novel two-stage framework tailored for unsupervised anomaly detection in astronomical observations. In the first stage, we employ a Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture to learn the normal temporal patterns on each variate (i.e., star) in alignment with the characteristic of variate independence. In the second stage, we enhance the graph neural network with a window-wise graph structure learning to tackle the occurrence of concurrent noise characterized by spatial and temporal randomness. In this way, AERO is not only capable of distinguishing normal temporal patterns from potential anomalies but also effectively differentiating concurrent noise, thus decreasing the number of false alarms. We conducted extensive experiments on three synthetic datasets and three real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that AERO outperforms the compared baselines. Notably, compared to the state-of-the-art model, AERO improves the F1-score by up to 8.76% and 2.63% on synthetic and real-world datasets respectively.