Navigating Time's Possibilities: Plausible Counterfactual Explanations for Multivariate Time-Series Forecast through Genetic Algorithms

Counterfactual learning has become promising for understanding and modeling causality in complex and dynamic systems. This paper presents a novel method for counterfactual learning in the context of multivariate time series analysis and forecast. The primary objective is to uncover hidden causal relationships and identify potential interventions to achieve desired outcomes. The proposed methodology integrates genetic algorithms and rigorous causality tests to infer and validate counterfactual dependencies within temporal sequences. More specifically, we employ Granger causality to enhance the reliability of identified causal relationships, rigorously assessing their statistical significance. Then, genetic algorithms, in conjunction with quantile regression, are used to exploit these intricate causal relationships to project future scenarios. The synergy between genetic algorithms and causality tests ensures a thorough exploration of the temporal dynamics present in the data, revealing hidden dependencies and enabling the projection of outcomes under hypothetical interventions. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm on real-world data, showcasing its ability to handle complex causal relationships, revealing meaningful counterfactual insights, and allowing for the prediction of outcomes under hypothetical interventions.

Hybrid Quantum Temporal Convolutional Networks

Quantum machine learning models for sequential data face scalability challenges with complex multivariate signals. We introduce the Hybrid Quantum Temporal Convolutional Network (HQTCN), which combines classical temporal windowing with a quantum convolutional neural network core. By applying a shared quantum circuit across temporal windows, HQTCN captures long-range dependencies while achieving significant parameter reduction. Evaluated on synthetic NARMA sequences and high-dimensional EEG time-series, HQTCN performs competitively with classical baselines on univariate data and outperforms all baselines on multivariate tasks. The model demonstrates particular strength under data-limited conditions, maintaining high performance with substantially fewer parameters than conventional approaches. These results establish HQTCN as a parameter-efficient approach for multivariate time-series analysis.

Distributed Dynamic Invariant Causal Prediction in Environmental Time Series

The extraction of invariant causal relationships from time series data with environmental attributes is critical for robust decision-making in domains such as climate science and environmental monitoring. However, existing methods either emphasize dynamic causal analysis without leveraging environmental contexts or focus on static invariant causal inference, leaving a gap in distributed temporal settings. In this paper, we propose Distributed Dynamic Invariant Causal Prediction in Time-series (DisDy-ICPT), a novel framework that learns dynamic causal relationships over time while mitigating spatial confounding variables without requiring data communication. We theoretically prove that DisDy-ICPT recovers stable causal predictors within a bounded number of communication rounds under standard sampling assumptions. Empirical evaluations on synthetic benchmarks and environment-segmented real-world datasets show that DisDy-ICPT achieves superior predictive stability and accuracy compared to baseline methods A and B. Our approach offers promising applications in carbon monitoring and weather forecasting. Future work will extend DisDy-ICPT to online learning scenarios.

LLM-MLFFN: Multi-Level Autonomous Driving Behavior Feature Fusion via Large Language Model

Accurate classification of autonomous vehicle (AV) driving behaviors is critical for safety validation, performance diagnosis, and traffic integration analysis. However, existing approaches primarily rely on numerical time-series modeling and often lack semantic abstraction, limiting interpretability and robustness in complex traffic environments. This paper presents LLM-MLFFN, a novel large language model (LLM)-enhanced multi-level feature fusion network designed to address the complexities of multi-dimensional driving data. The proposed LLM-MLFFN framework integrates priors from largescale pre-trained models and employs a multi-level approach to enhance classification accuracy. LLM-MLFFN comprises three core components: (1) a multi-level feature extraction module that extracts statistical, behavioral, and dynamic features to capture the quantitative aspects of driving behaviors; (2) a semantic description module that leverages LLMs to transform raw data into high-level semantic features; and (3) a dual-channel multi-level feature fusion network that combines numerical and semantic features using weighted attention mechanisms to improve robustness and prediction accuracy. Evaluation on the Waymo open trajectory dataset demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed LLM-MLFFN, achieving a classification accuracy of over 94%, surpassing existing machine learning models. Ablation studies further validate the critical contributions of multi-level fusion, feature extraction strategies, and LLM-derived semantic reasoning. These results suggest that integrating structured feature modeling with language-driven semantic abstraction provides a principled and interpretable pathway for robust autonomous driving behavior classification.

KairosVL: Orchestrating Time Series and Semantics for Unified Reasoning

Driven by the increasingly complex and decision-oriented demands of time series analysis, we introduce the Semantic-Conditional Time Series Reasoning task, which extends conventional time series analysis beyond purely numerical modeling to incorporate contextual and semantic understanding. To further enhance the mode's reasoning capabilities on complex time series problems, we propose a two-round reinforcement learning framework: the first round strengthens the mode's perception of fundamental temporal primitives, while the second focuses on semantic-conditioned reasoning. The resulting model, KairosVL, achieves competitive performance across both synthetic and real-world tasks. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our framework not only boosts performance but also preserves intrinsic reasoning ability and significantly improves generalization to unseen scenarios. To summarize, our work highlights the potential of combining semantic reasoning with temporal modeling and provides a practical framework for real-world time series intelligence, which is in urgent demand.

Cross-Task Benchmarking of CNN Architectures

This project provides a comparative study of dynamic convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for various tasks, including image classification, segmentation, and time series analysis. Based on the ResNet-18 architecture, we compare five variants of CNNs: the vanilla CNN, the hard attention-based CNN, the soft attention-based CNN with local (pixel-wise) and global (image-wise) feature attention, and the omni-directional CNN (ODConv). Experiments on Tiny ImageNet, Pascal VOC, and the UCR Time Series Classification Archive illustrate that attention mechanisms and dynamic convolution methods consistently exceed conventional CNNs in accuracy, efficiency, and computational performance. ODConv was especially effective on morphologically complex images by being able to dynamically adjust to varying spatial patterns. Dynamic CNNs enhanced feature representation and cross-task generalization through adaptive kernel modulation. This project provides perspectives on advanced CNN design architecture for multiplexed data modalities and indicates promising directions in neural network engineering.

LaSTR: Language-Driven Time-Series Segment Retrieval

Effectively searching time-series data is essential for system analysis, but existing methods often require expert-designed similarity criteria or rely on global, series-level descriptions. We study language-driven segment retrieval: given a natural language query, the goal is to retrieve relevant local segments from large time-series repositories. We build large-scale segment--caption training data by applying TV2-based segmentation to LOTSA windows and generating segment descriptions with GPT-5.2, and then train a Conformer-based contrastive retriever in a shared text--time-series embedding space. On a held-out test split, we evaluate single-positive retrieval together with caption-side consistency (SBERT and VLM-as-a-judge) under multiple candidate pool sizes. Across all settings, LaSTR outperforms random and CLIP baselines, yielding improved ranking quality and stronger semantic agreement between retrieved segments and query intent.

Deep Learning for Financial Time Series: A Large-Scale Benchmark of Risk-Adjusted Performance

We present a large scale benchmark of modern deep learning architectures for a financial time series prediction and position sizing task, with a primary focus on Sharpe ratio optimization. Evaluating linear models, recurrent networks, transformer based architectures, state space models, and recent sequence representation approaches, we assess out of sample performance on a daily futures dataset spanning commodities, equity indices, bonds, and FX spanning 2010 to 2025. Our evaluation goes beyond average returns and includes statistical significance, downside and tail risk measures, breakeven transaction cost analysis, robustness to random seed selection, and computational efficiency. We find that models explicitly designed to learn rich temporal representations consistently outperform linear benchmarks and generic deep learning models, which often lead the ranking in standard time series benchmarks. Hybrid models such as VSN with LSTM, a combination of Variable Selection Networks (VSN) and LSTMs, achieves the highest overall Sharpe ratio, while VSN with xLSTM and LSTM with PatchTST exhibit superior downside adjusted characteristics. xLSTM demonstrates the largest breakeven transaction cost buffer, indicating improved robustness to trading frictions.

Time Series Foundation Models as Strong Baselines in Transportation Forecasting: A Large-Scale Benchmark Analysis

Accurate forecasting of transportation dynamics is essential for urban mobility and infrastructure planning. Although recent work has achieved strong performance with deep learning models, these methods typically require dataset-specific training, architecture design and hyper-parameter tuning. This paper evaluates whether general-purpose time-series foundation models can serve as forecasters for transportation tasks by benchmarking the zero-shot performance of the state-of-the-art model, Chronos-2, across ten real-world datasets covering highway traffic volume and flow, urban traffic speed, bike-sharing demand, and electric vehicle charging station data. Under a consistent evaluation protocol, we find that, even without any task-specific fine-tuning, Chronos-2 delivers state-of-the-art or competitive accuracy across most datasets, frequently outperforming classical statistical baselines and specialized deep learning architectures, particularly at longer horizons. Beyond point forecasting, we evaluate its native probabilistic outputs using prediction-interval coverage and sharpness, demonstrating that Chronos-2 also provides useful uncertainty quantification without dataset-specific training. In general, this study supports the adoption of time-series foundation models as a key baseline for transportation forecasting research.

Augmenting representations with scientific papers

Astronomers have acquired vast repositories of multimodal data, including images, spectra, and time series, complemented by decades of literature that analyzes astrophysical sources. Still, these data sources are rarely systematically integrated. This work introduces a contrastive learning framework designed to align X-ray spectra with domain knowledge extracted from scientific literature, facilitating the development of shared multimodal representations. Establishing this connection is inherently complex, as scientific texts encompass a broader and more diverse physical context than spectra. We propose a contrastive pipeline that achieves a 20% Recall@1% when retrieving texts from spectra, proving that a meaningful alignment between these modalities is not only possible but capable of accelerating the interpretation of rare or poorly understood sources. Furthermore, the resulting shared latent space effectively encodes physically significant information. By fusing spectral and textual data, we improve the estimation of 20 physical variables by 16-18% over unimodal spectral baselines. Our results indicate that a Mixture of Experts (MoE) strategy, which leverages both unimodal and shared representations, yields superior performance. Finally, outlier analysis within the multimodal latent space identifies high-priority targets for follow-up investigation, including a candidate pulsating ULX (PULX) and a gravitational lens system. Importantly, this framework can be extended to other scientific domains where aligning observational data with existing literature is possible.