SCENARIODIFF: A Scenario-level Guidance Framework for Multimodal Time Series Forecasting--Extended Version

Textual context such as news, reports, and logs can provide valuable signals for time series forecasting, especially when future dynamics are driven by external events that are not yet visible in historical values. Existing multimodal forecasting methods often either ask large language models (LLMs) to predict numerical values directly or fuse text and time series implicitly, making contextual influence difficult to interpret and control. We propose SCENARIODIFF, a hierarchical contextual reasoning framework for multimodal time series forecasting under noisy and weakly aligned documents. SCENARIODIFF organizes contextual information into three levels: a Historical Context Agent extracts stepwise evidence from raw documents, a Scenario Agent produces a qualitative scenario description for the forecast horizon, and an Anchor Guidance Agent generates sparse anchor points for event-relevant future regions. These structured signals condition a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer, while Anchor Blended Sampling locally refines generated trajectories without retraining. Experiments on the Time-MMD benchmark show that SCENARIODIFF is especially effective in event-driven domains, demonstrating the value of explicit hierarchical scenario guidance for multimodal time series forecasting. Our full implementation is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ScenarioDiff_ICDM-2C4C

Guiding Noisy Label Conditional Diffusion Models with Score-based Discriminator Correction

Diffusion models have gained prominence as state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing images and videos, particularly due to their ability to scale effectively with large datasets. Recent studies have uncovered that these extensive datasets often contain mistakes from manual labeling processes. However, the extent to which such errors compromise the generative capabilities and controllability of diffusion models is not well studied. This paper introduces Score-based Discriminator Correction (SBDC), a guidance technique for aligning noisy pre-trained conditional diffusion models. The guidance is built on discriminator training using adversarial loss, drawing on prior noise detection techniques to assess the authenticity of each sample. We further show that limiting the usage of our guidance to the early phase of the generation process leads to better performance. Our method is computationally efficient, only marginally increases inference time, and does not require retraining diffusion models. Experiments on different noise settings demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-art methods.