ZARA: Zero-shot Motion Time-Series Analysis via Knowledge and Retrieval Driven LLM Agents

Motion sensor time-series are central to human activity recognition (HAR), with applications in health, sports, and smart devices. However, existing methods are trained for fixed activity sets and require costly retraining when new behaviours or sensor setups appear. Recent attempts to use large language models (LLMs) for HAR, typically by converting signals into text or images, suffer from limited accuracy and lack verifiable interpretability. We propose ZARA, the first agent-based framework for zero-shot, explainable HAR directly from raw motion time-series. ZARA integrates an automatically derived pair-wise feature knowledge base that captures discriminative statistics for every activity pair, a multi-sensor retrieval module that surfaces relevant evidence, and a hierarchical agent pipeline that guides the LLM to iteratively select features, draw on this evidence, and produce both activity predictions and natural-language explanations. ZARA enables flexible and interpretable HAR without any fine-tuning or task-specific classifiers. Extensive experiments on 8 HAR benchmarks show that ZARA achieves SOTA zero-shot performance, delivering clear reasoning while exceeding the strongest baselines by 2.53x in macro F1. Ablation studies further confirm the necessity of each module, marking ZARA as a promising step toward trustworthy, plug-and-play motion time-series analysis. Our codes are available at https://github.com/zechenli03/ZARA.

Semantic-Enhanced Time-Series Forecasting via Large Language Models

Time series forecasting plays a significant role in finance, energy, meteorology, and IoT applications. Recent studies have leveraged the generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to adapt to time series forecasting, achieving promising performance. However, existing studies focus on token-level modal alignment, instead of bridging the intrinsic modality gap between linguistic knowledge structures and time series data patterns, greatly limiting the semantic representation. To address this issue, we propose a novel Semantic-Enhanced LLM (SE-LLM) that explores the inherent periodicity and anomalous characteristics of time series to embed into the semantic space to enhance the token embedding. This process enhances the interpretability of tokens for LLMs, thereby activating the potential of LLMs for temporal sequence analysis. Moreover, existing Transformer-based LLMs excel at capturing long-range dependencies but are weak at modeling short-term anomalies in time-series data. Hence, we propose a plugin module embedded within self-attention that models long-term and short-term dependencies to effectively adapt LLMs to time-series analysis. Our approach freezes the LLM and reduces the sequence dimensionality of tokens, greatly reducing computational consumption. Experiments demonstrate the superiority performance of our SE-LLM against the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

The Coherent Multiplex: Scalable Real-Time Wavelet Coherence Architecture

The Coherent Multiplex is formalized and validated as a scalable, real-time system for identifying, analyzing, and visualizing coherence among multiple time series. Its architecture comprises a fast spectral similarity layer based on cosine similarity metrics of Fourier-transformed signals, and a sparse time-frequency layer for wavelet coherence. The system constructs and evolves a multilayer graph representing inter-signal relationships, enabling low-latency inference and monitoring. A simulation prototype demonstrates functionality across 8 synthetic channels with a high similarity threshold for further computation, with additional opportunities for scaling the architecture up to support thousands of input signals with constrained hardware. Applications discussed include neuroscience, finance, and biomedical signal analysis.

Scene-Aware Vectorized Memory Multi-Agent Framework with Cross-Modal Differentiated Quantization VLMs for Visually Impaired Assistance

This study proposes the dual technological innovation framework, including a cross-modal differ entiated quantization framework for vision-language models (VLMs) and a scene-aware vectorized memory multi-agent system for visually impaired assistance. The modular framework was developed implementing differentiated processing strategies, effectively reducing memory requirements from 38GB to 16GB while maintaining model performance. The multi-agent architecture combines scene classification, vectorized memory, and multimodal interaction, enabling persistent storage and efficient retrieval of scene memories. Through perception-memory-reasoning workflows, the system provides environmental information beyond the current view using historical memories. Experiments show the quantized 19B-parameter model only experiences a 2.05% performance drop on MMBench and maintains 63.7 accuracy on OCR-VQA (original: 64.9), outperforming smaller models with equivalent memory requirements like the Molmo-7B series. The system maintains response latency between 2.83-3.52 seconds from scene analysis to initial speech output, substantially faster than non-streaming methods. This research advances computational efficiency and assistive technology, offering visually impaired users comprehensive real-time assistance in scene perception, text recognition, and navigation.

FeDaL: Federated Dataset Learning for Time Series Foundation Models

Dataset-wise heterogeneity introduces significant domain biases that fundamentally degrade generalization on Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), yet this challenge remains underexplored. This paper rethink the development of TSFMs using the paradigm of federated learning. We propose a novel Federated Dataset Learning (FeDaL) approach to tackle heterogeneous time series by learning dataset-agnostic temporal representations. Specifically, the distributed architecture of federated learning is a nature solution to decompose heterogeneous TS datasets into shared generalized knowledge and preserved personalized knowledge. Moreover, based on the TSFM architecture, FeDaL explicitly mitigates both local and global biases by adding two complementary mechanisms: Domain Bias Elimination (DBE) and Global Bias Elimination (GBE). FeDaL`s cross-dataset generalization has been extensively evaluated in real-world datasets spanning eight tasks, including both representation learning and downstream time series analysis, against 54 baselines. We further analyze federated scaling behavior, showing how data volume, client count, and join rate affect model performance under decentralization.

Learning ECG Representations via Poly-Window Contrastive Learning

Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is foundational for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, yet the performance of deep learning models is often constrained by limited access to annotated data. Self-supervised contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful approach for learning robust ECG representations from unlabeled signals. However, most existing methods generate only pairwise augmented views and fail to leverage the rich temporal structure of ECG recordings. In this work, we present a poly-window contrastive learning framework. We extract multiple temporal windows from each ECG instance to construct positive pairs and maximize their agreement via statistics. Inspired by the principle of slow feature analysis, our approach explicitly encourages the model to learn temporally invariant and physiologically meaningful features that persist across time. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and ablation studies on the PTB-XL dataset. Our results demonstrate that poly-window contrastive learning consistently outperforms conventional two-view methods in multi-label superclass classification, achieving higher AUROC (0.891 vs. 0.888) and F1 scores (0.680 vs. 0.679) while requiring up to four times fewer pre-training epochs (32 vs. 128) and 14.8% in total wall clock pre-training time reduction. Despite processing multiple windows per sample, we achieve a significant reduction in the number of training epochs and total computation time, making our method practical for training foundational models. Through extensive ablations, we identify optimal design choices and demonstrate robustness across various hyperparameters. These findings establish poly-window contrastive learning as a highly efficient and scalable paradigm for automated ECG analysis and provide a promising general framework for self-supervised representation learning in biomedical time-series data.

Automating the Deep Space Network Data Systems; A Case Study in Adaptive Anomaly Detection through Agentic AI

The Deep Space Network (DSN) is NASA's largest network of antenna facilities that generate a large volume of multivariate time-series data. These facilities contain DSN antennas and transmitters that undergo degradation over long periods of time, which may cause costly disruptions to the data flow and threaten the earth-connection of dozens of spacecraft that rely on the Deep Space Network for their lifeline. The purpose of this study was to experiment with different methods that would be able to assist JPL engineers with directly pinpointing anomalies and equipment degradation through collected data, and continue conducting maintenance and operations of the DSN for future space missions around our universe. As such, we have researched various machine learning techniques that can fully reconstruct data through predictive analysis, and determine anomalous data entries within real-time datasets through statistical computations and thresholds. On top of the fully trained and tested machine learning models, we have also integrated the use of a reinforcement learning subsystem that classifies identified anomalies based on severity level and a Large Language Model that labels an explanation for each anomalous data entry, all of which can be improved and fine-tuned over time through human feedback/input. Specifically, for the DSN transmitters, we have also implemented a full data pipeline system that connects the data extraction, parsing, and processing workflow all together as there was no coherent program or script for performing these tasks before. Using this data pipeline system, we were able to then also connect the models trained from DSN antenna data, completing the data workflow for DSN anomaly detection. This was all wrapped around and further connected by an agentic AI system, where complex reasoning was utilized to determine the classifications and predictions of anomalous data.

Salt-Rock Creep Deformation Forecasting Using Deep Neural Networks and Analytical Models for Subsurface Energy Storage Applications

This study provides an in-depth analysis of time series forecasting methods to predict the time-dependent deformation trend (also known as creep) of salt rock under varying confining pressure conditions. Creep deformation assessment is essential for designing and operating underground storage facilities for nuclear waste, hydrogen energy, or radioactive materials. Salt rocks, known for their mechanical properties like low porosity, low permeability, high ductility, and exceptional creep and self-healing capacities, were examined using multi-stage triaxial (MSTL) creep data. After resampling, axial strain datasets were recorded at 5--10 second intervals under confining pressure levels ranging from 5 to 35 MPa over 5.8--21 days. Initial analyses, including Seasonal-Trend Decomposition (STL) and Granger causality tests, revealed minimal seasonality and causality between axial strain and temperature data. Further statistical tests, such as the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test, confirmed the stationarity of the data with p-values less than 0.05, and wavelet coherence plot (WCP) analysis indicated repeating trends. A suite of deep neural network (DNN) models (Neural Basis Expansion Analysis for Time Series (N-BEATS), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and Transformers (TF)) was utilized and compared against statistical baseline models. Predictive performance was evaluated using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), and Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE). Results demonstrated that N-BEATS and TCN models outperformed others across various stress levels, respectively. DNN models, particularly N-BEATS and TCN, showed a 15--20\% improvement in accuracy over traditional analytical models, effectively capturing complex temporal dependencies and patterns.

ME-TST+: Micro-expression Analysis via Temporal State Transition with ROI Relationship Awareness

Micro-expressions (MEs) are regarded as important indicators of an individual's intrinsic emotions, preferences, and tendencies. ME analysis requires spotting of ME intervals within long video sequences and recognition of their corresponding emotional categories. Previous deep learning approaches commonly employ sliding-window classification networks. However, the use of fixed window lengths and hard classification presents notable limitations in practice. Furthermore, these methods typically treat ME spotting and recognition as two separate tasks, overlooking the essential relationship between them. To address these challenges, this paper proposes two state space model-based architectures, namely ME-TST and ME-TST+, which utilize temporal state transition mechanisms to replace conventional window-level classification with video-level regression. This enables a more precise characterization of the temporal dynamics of MEs and supports the modeling of MEs with varying durations. In ME-TST+, we further introduce multi-granularity ROI modeling and the slowfast Mamba framework to alleviate information loss associated with treating ME analysis as a time-series task. Additionally, we propose a synergy strategy for spotting and recognition at both the feature and result levels, leveraging their intrinsic connection to enhance overall analysis performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance. The codes are available at https://github.com/zizheng-guo/ME-TST.

One Joke to Rule them All? On the (Im)possibility of Generalizing Humor

Humor is a broad and complex form of communication that remains challenging for machines. Despite its broadness, most existing research on computational humor traditionally focused on modeling a specific type of humor. In this work, we wish to understand whether competence on one or more specific humor tasks confers any ability to transfer to novel, unseen types; in other words, is this fragmentation inevitable? This question is especially timely as new humor types continuously emerge in online and social media contexts (e.g., memes, anti-humor, AI fails). If Large Language Models (LLMs) are to keep up with this evolving landscape, they must be able to generalize across humor types by capturing deeper, transferable mechanisms. To investigate this, we conduct a series of transfer learning experiments across four datasets, representing different humor tasks. We train LLMs under varied diversity settings (1-3 datasets in training, testing on a novel task). Experiments reveal that models are capable of some transfer, and can reach up to 75% accuracy on unseen datasets; training on diverse sources improves transferability (1.88-4.05%) with minimal-to-no drop in in-domain performance. Further analysis suggests relations between humor types, with Dad Jokes surprisingly emerging as the best enabler of transfer (but is difficult to transfer to). We release data and code.