Abstract:Microscopic road-network weights represent fine-grained, time-varying traffic conditions obtained from individual vehicles. An example is travel speeds associated with road segments as vehicles traverse them. These weights support tasks including traffic microsimulation and vehicle routing with reliability guarantees. We study the problem of time-varying microscopic weight completion. During a time slot, the available weights typically cover only some road segments. Weight completion recovers distributions for the weights of every road segment at the current time slot. This problem involves two challenges: (i) contending with two layers of sparsity, where weights are missing at both the network layer (many road segments lack weights) and the segment layer (a segment may have insufficient weights to enable accurate distribution estimation); and (ii) achieving a weight distribution representation that is closed-form and can capture complex conditions flexibly, including heavy tails and multiple clusters. To address these challenges, we propose DiSGMM that combines sparsity-aware embeddings with spatiotemporal modeling to leverage sparse known weights alongside learned segment properties and long-range correlations for distribution estimation. DiSGMM represents distributions of microscopic weights as learnable Gaussian mixture models, providing closed-form distributions capable of capturing complex conditions flexibly. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that DiSGMM can outperform state-of-the-art methods.
Abstract:Amorphous materials are solids that lack long-range atomic order but possess complex short- and medium-range order. Unlike crystalline materials that can be described by unit cells containing few up to hundreds of atoms, amorphous materials require larger simulation cells with at least hundreds or often thousands of atoms. Inverse design of amorphous materials with probabilistic generative models aims to generate the atomic positions and elements of amorphous materials given a set of desired properties. It has emerged as a promising approach for facilitating the application of amorphous materials in domains such as energy storage and thermal management. In this paper, we introduce AMShortcut, an inference- and training-efficient probabilistic generative model for amorphous materials. AMShortcut enables accurate inference of diverse short- and medium-range structures in amorphous materials with only a few sampling steps, mitigating the need for an excessive number of sampling steps that hinders inference efficiency. AMShortcut can be trained once with all relevant properties and perform inference conditioned on arbitrary combinations of desired properties, mitigating the need for training one model for each combination. Experiments on three amorphous materials datasets with diverse structures and properties demonstrate that AMShortcut achieves its design goals.
Abstract:Exogenous variables offer valuable supplementary information for predicting future endogenous variables. Forecasting with exogenous variables needs to consider both past-to-future dependencies (i.e., temporal correlations) and the influence of exogenous variables on endogenous variables (i.e., channel correlations). This is pivotal when future exogenous variables are available, because they may directly affect the future endogenous variables. Many methods have been proposed for time series forecasting with exogenous variables, focusing on modeling temporal and channel correlations. However, most of them use a two-step strategy, modeling temporal and channel correlations separately, which limits their ability to capture joint correlations across time and channels. Furthermore, in real-world scenarios, time series are frequently affected by various forms of noises, underscoring the critical importance of robustness in such correlations modeling. To address these limitations, we propose GCGNet, a Graph-Consistent Generative Network for time series forecasting with exogenous variables. Specifically, GCGNet first employs a Variational Generator to produce coarse predictions. A Graph Structure Aligner then further guides it by evaluating the consistency between the generated and true correlations, where the correlations are represented as graphs, and are robust to noises. Finally, a Graph Refiner is proposed to refine the predictions to prevent degeneration and improve accuracy. Extensive experiments on 12 real-world datasets demonstrate that GCGNet outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Abstract:LLM-powered Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have emerged as an effective approach towards collaborative intelligence, and have attracted wide research interests. Among them, ``self-evolving'' MAS, treated as a more flexible and powerful technical route, can construct task-adaptive workflows or communication topologies, instead of relying on a predefined static structue template. Current self-evolving MAS mainly focus on Spatial Evolving or Temporal Evolving paradigm, which only considers the single dimension of evolution and does not fully incentivize LLMs' collaborative capability. In this work, we start from a novel Spatio-Temporal perspective by proposing ST-EVO, which supports dialogue-wise communication scheduling with a compact yet powerful flow-matching based Scheduler. To make precise Spatio-Temporal scheduling, ST-EVO can also perceive the uncertainty of MAS, and possesses self-feedback ability to learn from accumulated experience. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of ST-EVO, achieving about 5%--25% accuracy improvement.
Abstract:While Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in generalized forecasting, their performance often degrades significantly when deployed in real-world vertical domains characterized by temporal distribution shifts and domain-specific periodic structures. Current solutions are primarily constrained by two paradigms: Domain-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT), which improves short-term domain fitting but frequently disrupts previously learned global temporal patterns due to catastrophic forgetting; and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which incorporates external knowledge but introduces substantial retrieval overhead. This creates a severe scalability bottleneck that fails to meet the high-efficiency requirements of real-time stream processing. To break this impasse, we propose Memory for Time Series (MEMTS), a lightweight and plug-and-play method for retrieval-free domain adaptation in time series forecasting. The key component of MEMTS is a Knowledge Persistence Module (KPM), which internalizes domain-specific temporal dynamics, such as recurring seasonal patterns and trends into a compact set of learnable latent prototypes. In doing so, it transforms fragmented historical observations into continuous, parameterized knowledge representations. This paradigm shift enables MEMTS to achieve accurate domain adaptation with constant-time inference and near-zero latency, while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting of general temporal patterns, all without requiring any architectural modifications to the frozen TSFM backbone. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the SOTA performance of MEMTS.
Abstract:Time series forecasting is important in many fields that require accurate predictions for decision-making. Patching techniques, commonly used and effective in time series modeling, help capture temporal dependencies by dividing the data into patches. However, existing patch-based methods fail to dynamically select patches and typically use all patches during the prediction process. In real-world time series, there are often low-quality issues during data collection, such as missing values, distribution shifts, anomalies and white noise, which may cause some patches to contain low-quality information, negatively impacting the prediction results. To address this issue, this study proposes a robust time series forecasting framework called SEER. Firstly, we propose an Augmented Embedding Module, which improves patch-wise representations using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and obtains series-wise token representations through a channel-adaptive perception mechanism. Secondly, we introduce a Learnable Patch Replacement Module, which enhances forecasting robustness and model accuracy through a two-stage process: 1) a dynamic filtering mechanism eliminates negative patch-wise tokens; 2) a replaced attention module substitutes the identified low-quality patches with global series-wise token, further refining their representations through a causal attention mechanism. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the SOTA performance of SEER.
Abstract:Irregular multivariate time series forecasting (IMTSF) is challenging due to non-uniform sampling and variable asynchronicity. These irregularities violate the equidistant assumptions of standard models, hindering local temporal modeling and rendering classical frequency-domain methods ineffective for capturing global periodic structures. To address this challenge, we propose TFMixer, a joint time-frequency modeling framework for IMTS forecasting. Specifically, TFMixer incorporates a Global Frequency Module that employs a learnable Non-Uniform Discrete Fourier Transform (NUDFT) to directly extract spectral representations from irregular timestamps. In parallel, the Local Time Module introduces a query-based patch mixing mechanism to adaptively aggregate informative temporal patches and alleviate information density imbalance. Finally, TFMixer fuses the time-domain and frequency-domain representations to generate forecasts and further leverages inverse NUDFT for explicit seasonal extrapolation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the state--of-the-art performance of TFMixer.
Abstract:Time series data widely exist in real-world cyber-physical systems. Though analyzing and interpreting them contributes to significant values, e.g, disaster prediction and financial risk control, current workflows mainly rely on human data scientists, which requires significant labor costs and lacks automation. To tackle this, we introduce TimeART, a framework fusing the analytical capability of strong out-of-the-box tools and the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), which serves as a fully agentic data scientist for Time Series Question Answering (TSQA). To teach the LLM-based Time Series Reasoning Models (TSRMs) strategic tool-use, we also collect a 100k expert trajectory corpus called TimeToolBench. To enhance TSRMs' generalization capability, we then devise a four-stage training strategy, which boosts TSRMs through learning from their own early experiences and self-reflections. Experimentally, we train an 8B TSRM on TimeToolBench and equip it with the TimeART framework, and it achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance on multiple TSQA tasks, which pioneers a novel approach towards agentic time series reasoning.
Abstract:Generative modeling offers a promising solution to data scarcity and privacy challenges in time series analysis. However, the structural complexity of time series, characterized by multi-scale temporal patterns and heterogeneous components, remains insufficiently addressed. In this work, we propose a structure-disentangled multiscale generation framework for time series. Our approach encodes sequences into discrete tokens at multiple temporal resolutions and performs autoregressive generation in a coarse-to-fine manner, thereby preserving hierarchical dependencies. To tackle structural heterogeneity, we introduce a dual-path VQ-VAE that disentangles trend and seasonal components, enabling the learning of semantically consistent latent representations. Additionally, we present a guidance-based reconstruction strategy, where coarse seasonal signals are utilized as priors to guide the reconstruction of fine-grained seasonal patterns. Experiments on six datasets show that our approach produces higher-quality time series than existing methods. Notably, our model achieves strong performance with a significantly reduced parameter count and exhibits superior capability in generating high-quality long-term sequences. Our implementation is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TimeMAR-BC5B.
Abstract:Map matching for sparse trajectories is a fundamental problem for many trajectory-based applications, e.g., traffic scheduling and traffic flow analysis. Existing methods for map matching are generally based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) or encoder-decoder framework. However, these methods continue to face significant challenges when handling noisy or sparsely sampled GPS trajectories. To address these limitations, we propose DiffMM, an encoder-diffusion-based map matching framework that produces effective yet efficient matching results through a one-step diffusion process. We first introduce a road segment-aware trajectory encoder that jointly embeds the input trajectory and its surrounding candidate road segments into a shared latent space through an attention mechanism. Next, we propose a one step diffusion method to realize map matching through a shortcut model by leveraging the joint embedding of the trajectory and candidate road segments as conditioning context. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale trajectory datasets, demonstrating that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art map matching methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency, particularly for sparse trajectories and complex road network topologies.