SCoRD: Semantic-Assisted Continual Retriever-Reranker Distillation for LLM-Based Recommendation

Recommendation systems increasingly adopt a two-stage pipeline, where an ID-based retriever retrieves candidates and an LLM-based reranker refines their rankings. To improve retrieval quality, reranker-to-retriever distillation is commonly used to transfer the reranker's knowledge to the retriever. For practical deployment, however, this pipeline must continually adapt to evolving interests and incoming interactions. A naive solution is to repeatedly update the LLM reranker and distill its latest knowledge, but this incurs prohibitive costs. Updating the retriever alone is cheaper, but its limited capacity makes adaptation from sparse data difficult. We propose SCoRD, a continual knowledge distillation framework for LLM-based reranking pipelines under a non-stationary data stream. SCoRD introduces a semantic reasoning assistant that distills the LLM's ability to infer underlying user intents into reusable intent-level guidance. It selectively distills reranker knowledge to the retriever on low-confidence sequences, guides retriever-only updates without repeated LLM inference, and feeds retriever-derived representations and intent-drift signals back to the reranker. Experiments on real-world datasets show that SCoRD enables effective and efficient retriever-reranker co-adaptation.

FinVerse: Financial Time-Series Benchmark

As time-series foundation models have emerged, the need for benchmarks that can evaluate their forecasting ability in meaningful ways has become increasingly important. Existing time-series forecasting benchmarks provide useful standardized comparisons, but they often evaluate heterogeneous series with uniform error-based metrics. Strong performance under such metrics does not necessarily imply that a model's forecasts will support the best real-world decisions across domains. For example, in stock forecasting, correctly predicting whether a price will rise or fall can be more directly relevant to realized returns than minimizing point-wise forecast error alone. To this end, we introduce FinVerse, a finance-domain time-series forecasting benchmark that takes a first step toward more realistic evaluation. The released FinVerse data artifact contains 116,897 financial time series with 171.1M observations, of which 60,232 series with 17.4M observations are selected as evaluated targets based on their economic relevance to financial decisions. Unlike generic forecasting benchmarks that primarily emphasize uniform point-forecast or probabilistic accuracy, FinVerse defines 11 metric families comprising 78 evaluation metrics and assigns the most appropriate evaluation metrics to each individual time series based on its underlying economic meaning. Our analysis of 43 public time-series forecasting foundation models shows that strong performance under generic forecasting criteria does not necessarily translate into useful financial forecasts. This finding highlights the need for domain-aware benchmarks that evaluate models under objectives closer to real-world decision making.

ReasonCast: Towards Explainable Time Series Forecasting with Reasoning

Most time series (TS) models are specialized for a single task, either understanding (i.e., returning text answers about a TS) or generation (i.e., returning a numeric forecast). Only recently have unified models begun to handle the two within a single architecture. Even these models, however, produce the two outputs as task-separated paths and cannot predict a series and explain why that prediction arises within a single coherent response. In this paper, we argue for a task-fused model that jointly produces 1) prediction (generation) and 2) selfexplanation (understanding), thereby integrating 1) numerical TS forecasting and 2) interpretable text reasoning within a single response. To enable the systematic study of this capability, we present both a benchmark and a recipe that jointly address the two tasks. The benchmark, ReasonTS-Bench, identifies five fundamental patterns underlying TS and enables the joint evaluation of both tasks. ReasonCast, our recipe for finetuning any LLM to perform both tasks jointly, yields a model that generates a reasoning chain and a forecast together in a single autoregressive pass. Extensive experiments show that ReasonCast outperforms both LLMs and TS models on prediction accuracy while producing verifiable, causal reasoning. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/reasoncast.

Beyond Magnitude and Shape: A Direction-Aware Loss for Time Series Forecasting

The direction of change --- whether a series will move up or down --- is often as important as its exact value in decisiondriven applications such as risk management and financial forecasting. However, most forecasting losses optimize either point magnitude or shape and frequency structure, and none explicitly targets the direction of change. In this paper, we find that MSE-trained forecasters fail on the direction of small moves. To address this, we propose CosDir, a simple yet effective direction-aware loss that aligns the difference vectors of the prediction and the target via cosine similarity. Being scale-invariant, CosDir keeps a directional gradient on small moves, re-injecting learning signal exactly where MSE neglects it. CosDir is a lightweight, plug-in term that attaches to any backbone without architectural modification. Since the best ratio for mixing the directional and magnitude terms differs across datasets, we further propose CosDir-UW, an extension that makes this ratio adaptive by learning it during training, matching a per-dataset tuned weight with no hyperparameter. We conduct over 100K experiments, demonstrating that our method consistently and significantly improves directional accuracy while preserving magnitude accuracy, and that it outperforms various loss functions. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/cosdir.

When Summaries Distort Decisions: Information Fidelity in LLM-Compressed Financial Analysis

Financial decision-makers face more information than they can directly inspect, making context compression necessary. Yet when large language models (LLMs) compress financial source material, they can alter the investment judgment supported by the original source. We frame this problem as information fidelity: compression loses fidelity when it changes the decision induced by the source. In agentic systems, such losses may recur across intermediate steps and amplify throughout the decision process. Across financial filings and earnings-call transcripts, we find that LLM-based compression can produce fluent and factually plausible compressed contexts that nevertheless alter downstream decisions. We analyze two diagnostic patterns associated with fidelity loss: decontextualization, where salient evidence is retained but separated from the caveats and contextual qualifiers needed for correct interpretation, and model dependency, where different compressors expose different views of the same source. We then propose Agentic Context Compression, which generates multiple candidate compressions and audits their disagreements against the original source. Our results suggest that financial compression should be evaluated not only by efficiency or factuality, but also by its ability to preserve decision-relevant context.

Mitigating Label Shift in Tabular In-Context Learning via Test-Time Posterior Adjustment

TabPFN has recently gained attention as a foundation model for tabular datasets, achieving strong performance by leveraging in-context learning on synthetic data. However, we find that TabPFN is vulnerable to label shift, often overfitting to the majority class in the training dataset. To address this limitation, we propose DistPFN, the first test-time posterior adjustment method designed for tabular foundation models. DistPFN rescales predicted class probabilities by downweighting the influence of the training prior (i.e., the class distribution of the context) and emphasizing the contribution of the model's predicted posterior, without architectural modification or additional training. We further introduce DistPFN-T, which incorporates temperature scaling to adaptively control the adjustment strength based on the discrepancy between prior and posterior. We evaluate our methods on over 250 OpenML datasets, demonstrating substantial improvements for various TabPFN-based models in classification tasks under label shift, while maintaining strong performance in standard settings without label shift. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/seunghan96/DistPFN.

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail on financial domain, which exhibit unique characteristics. We propose a general 2x2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain -- where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical -- as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.

From Knowledge to Action: Outcomes of the 2025 Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing how researchers in materials science and chemistry discover, organize, and act on scientific knowledge. This paper analyzes a broad set of community-developed LLM applications in an effort to identify emerging patterns in how these systems can be used across the scientific research lifecycle. We organize the projects into two complementary categories: Knowledge Infrastructure, systems that structure, retrieve, synthesize, and validate scientific information; and Action Systems, systems that execute, coordinate, or automate scientific work across computational and experimental environments. The submissions reveal a shift from single-purpose LLM tools toward integrated, multi-agent workflows that combine retrieval, reasoning, tool use, and domain-specific validation. Prominent themes include retrieval-augmented generation as grounding infrastructure, persistent structured knowledge representations, multimodal and multilingual scientific inputs, and early progress toward laboratory-integrated closed-loop systems. Together, these results suggest that LLMs are evolving from general-purpose assistants into composable infrastructure for scientific reasoning and action. This work provides a community snapshot of that transition and a practical taxonomy for understanding emerging LLM-enabled workflows in materials science and chemistry.

Rethinking Multimodal Fusion for Time Series: Auxiliary Modalities Need Constrained Fusion

Recent advances in multimodal learning have motivated the integration of auxiliary modalities such as text or vision into time series (TS) forecasting. However, most existing methods provide limited gains, often improving performance only in specific datasets or relying on architecture-specific designs that limit generalization. In this paper, we show that multimodal models with naive fusion strategies (e.g., simple addition or concatenation) often underperform unimodal TS models, which we attribute to the uncontrolled integration of auxiliary modalities which may introduce irrelevant information. Motivated by this observation, we explore various constrained fusion methods designed to control such integration and find that they consistently outperform naive fusion methods. Furthermore, we propose Controlled Fusion Adapter (CFA), a simple plug-in method that enables controlled cross-modal interactions without modifying the TS backbone, integrating only relevant textual information aligned with TS dynamics. CFA employs low-rank adapters to filter irrelevant textual information before fusing it into temporal representations. We conduct over 20K experiments across various datasets and TS/text models, demonstrating the effectiveness of the constrained fusion methods including CFA. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/cfa/.

Cross-RAG: Zero-Shot Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting via Cross-Attention

Recent advances in time series foundation models (TSFMs) demonstrate strong expressive capacity through large-scale pretraining across diverse time series domains. Zero-shot time series forecasting with TSFMs, however, exhibits limited generalization to unseen datasets, which retrieval-augmented forecasting addresses by leveraging an external knowledge base. Existing approaches rely on a fixed number of retrieved samples that may introduce irrelevant information. To this end, we propose Cross-RAG, a zero-shot retrieval-augmented forecasting framework that selectively attends to query-relevant retrieved samples. Cross-RAG models input-level relevance between the query and retrieved samples via query-retrieval cross-attention, while jointly incorporating information from the query and retrieved samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cross-RAG consistently improves zero-shot forecasting performance across various TSFMs and RAG methods, and additional analyses confirm its effectiveness across diverse retrieval scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/cross-rag/.