(IJCAI'26) From Time Series Analysis to Question Answering: A Survey in the LLM Era

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🌐 Application

We applied our taxonomy to a literature interpretation tool and provided an Example that retrieves the latest relevant literature, helping readers quickly understand related works. We also provide a general ScholarAgent for subscription and use.

📚 Paper

Taxonomy of relevant literature across three alignment paradigms. The icon to the left of each method indicates its domain, while the absence of this icon denotes a general domain. The icon on the right denotes the use of time series visual plots. The background color of each method represents task targets: lighter shades denote time series analysis (TSA), and darker shades denote time series question answering (TSQA). The TSA literature dominates external Injective and Bridging Alignment, whereas the TSQA literature dominates Internal Alignment, reflecting the evolution from TSA to TSQA driven by a shift from external to internal alignment. Compared with existing surveys, this evolution perspective integrates previously isolated TSA and TSQA research into a unified taxonomy of alignment paradigms.

Alignment Paradigm

The horizontal axis indicates whether LLM parameters are trained, and the vertical axis indicates whether temporal modifications are required. Temporal modification refers to adapting time series for LLMs, including both modifications outside the LLM and adjustments to the internal LLM architecture. These two dimensions determine the three alignment paradigms.
(a) Injective Alignment involves no temporal modification and adopts frozen LLMs. This design preserves the original LLM parameters.
(b) Bridging Alignment introduces temporal modification while still employing frozen LLMs. This design enables joint processing of time series and textual inputs while preserving all parameters of the original LLM.
(c) Internal Alignment combines temporal modification with training LLMs by parameter updating to provide native support for time series.

We organize existing literature into the three alignment paradigms, along with related surveys and datasets.

Taxonomy
Injective
Bridging
Internal
Survey
Dataset

Taxonomy

Injective

Date	Paper	Institute	Publication	Domain	LLMs
12 Jan 2026	Enhancing Large Language Models for Time-Series Forecasting via Vector-Injected In-Context Learnin (LVICL)	Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences	Preprint	General	LLaMA-7B, GPT-2
11 May 2025	Can LLMs Understand Time Series Anomalies? (AnomLLM)	University of California	ICLR'25	General	GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-1.5-Flash
25 Apr 2025	A Picture is Worth A Thousand Numbers: Enabling LLMs Reason about Time Series via Visualization (TimerBed)[Code]	Georgia Institute of Technology	NAACL'25	General	GPT-4o-mini, Qwen2-VL-72B
16 Feb 2025	TableTime: Reformulating Time Series Classification as Training-Free Table Understanding with Large Language Models[Code]	University of Science and Technology of China	CIKM'25	General	Llama-3.1
24 Jan 2025	Argos: Agentic Time-Series Anomaly Detection with Autonomous Rule Generation via Large Language Models	University of Washington	Preprint	General	GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4o
24 Nov 2024	LeMoLE: LLM-Enhanced Mixture of Linear Experts for Time Series Forecasting[Code]	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)	Preprint	General	GPT2
18 Oct 2024	XForecast: Evaluating Natural Language Explanations for Time Series Forecasting	Salesforce AI Research	Preprint	General	GPT-4
14 Aug 2024	MedTsLLM: Leveraging LLMs for Multimodal Medical Time Series Analysis[Code]	Johns Hopkins University	MLHC'24	Medical	LLaMA
24 May 2024	Large Language Models can Deliver Accurate and Interpretable Time Series Anomaly Detection (LLMAD)	University of Chinese Academy of Sciences China	Preprint	General	GPT-4
2 Apr 2024	TEMPO: Prompt-based Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Time Series Forecasting[Code]	University of Southern California, Google	ICLR'24	General	GPT-2
6 Mar 2024	K-Link: Knowledge-Link Graph from LLMs for Enhanced Representation Learning in Multivariate Time-Series Data	Nanyang Technological University	Preprint	General	CLIP, GPT-2
25 Feb 2024	LSTPrompt: Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters by Long-Short-Term Prompting[Code]	Georgia Institute of Technology, Microsoft Research Asia	ACL'24 Findings	General	GPT-3.5, GPT-4
16 Feb 2024	Time Series Forecasting with LLMs: Understanding and Enhancing Model Capabilities (TSFLLMs)[Code]	Rutgers University	KDD'25 Explorations Newsletter	General	GPT-3.5, GPT-4, LLaMA-2
10 Feb 2024	REALM: RAG-Driven Enhancement of Multimodal Electronic Healthcare Records Analysis via Large Language Models	Beihang University, China Mobile Research Institute	Preprint	Medical	GPT-4, Qwen
10 Dec 2023	PromptCast: A New Prompt-based Learning Paradigm for Time Series Forecasting[Code]	University of New South Wales	TKDE'24	General	BART, BERT, ChatGPT
14 Nov 2023	TENT: Connect Language Models with IoT Sensors for Zero-Shot Activity Recognition	Nanyang Technological University	Preprint	IoT	CLIP, GPT-2
11 Oct 2023	Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters (LLMTime)[Code]	New York University	NeurIPS'23	General	GPT-3, LLaMA-2
22 Jun 2023	Instruct-FinGPT: Financial Sentiment Analysis by Instruction Tuning of General-Purpose Large Language Models	Columbia University	IJCAI'23 FinLLM Symposium	Financial	LLaMA, ChatGPT
24 May 2023	Large Language Models are Few-Shot Healthcare Learners[Code]	Google	Preprint	Medical	PaLM
10 Apr 2023	The Wall Street Neophyte: A Zero-Shot Analysis of ChatGPT Over MultiModal Stock Movement Prediction Challenges	Wuhan University	Preprint	Financial	ChatGPT
1 Jan 2023	Unleashing the Power of Shared Label Structures for Human Activity Recognition (SHARE)	University of California	CIKM'23	IoT	GPT-4

Bridging:

Date	Paper	Institute	Publication	Domain	LLMs
20 Jan 2026	ChatAD: Reasoning-Enhanced Time-Series Anomaly Detection with Multi-Turn Instruction Evolution	Nankai University	Preprint	General	GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1
27 Dec 2025	Chain-of-thought Reviewing and Correction for Time Series Question Answering (T3LLM)	University of Science and Technology of China	Preprint	General	DeepSeek-R1, Qwen2.5-14B
19 Dec 2025	Hierarchical Multimodal LLMs with Semantic Space Alignment for Enhanced Time Series Classification (HiTime)[Code]	University of Science and Technology of China	TIST'25	General	LLaMA3.1-8B GPT-2
25 Oct 2025	TimeXL: Explainable Multi-modal Time Series Prediction with LLM-in-the-Loop	University of Connecticut	NeurIPS'25	General	GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-2.0-Flash
6 Aug 2025	CLaSP: Learning Concepts for Time-Series Signals from Natural Language Supervision	Hosei University	EUSIPCO'25	General	BERT
19 May 2025	Decoding Time Series with LLMs: A Multi-Agent Framework for Cross-Domain Annotation (TESSA)	The Pennsylvania State University	Preprint	General	GPT-4o, LLaMA3.1-8B, Qwen2-7B
13 May 2025	MADLLM: Multivariate Anomaly Detection via Pre-trained LLMs	Huazhong University of Science and Technology	ICME'25	General	Unknown
12 May 2025	MedualTime: A Dual-Adapter Language Model for Medical Time Series-Text Multimodal Learning[Code]	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	IJCAI'25	General	GPT-2, BERT
12 May 2025	LLM-TPF: Multiscale Temporal Periodicity-Semantic Fusion LLMs for Time Series Forecasting[Code]	Zhejiang University of Technology	IJCAI'25	Energy	GPT-2
4 May 2025	Efficient Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Calibrated Language Models with Privileged Knowledge Distillation (TimeKD)[Code]	Nanyang Technological University	ICDE'25	General	BERT, GPT-2, LLaMA-3.2
8 Apr 2025	CALF: Aligning LLMs for Time Series Forecasting via Cross-modal Fine-Tuning[Code]	Tsinghua University	AAAI'25	General	GPT-2
5 Apr 2025	Context-Alignment: Activating and Enhancing LLMs Capabilities in Time Series (DECA)[Code]	The Hong Kong Polytechnic University	ICLR'25	General	GPT-2
20 Feb 2025	LLM4TS: Aligning Pre-Trained LLMs as Data-Efficient Time-Series Forecasters	National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University	TIST'25	General	GPT-2
19 Feb 2025	MERIT: Multi-Agent Collaboration for Unsupervised Time Series Representation Learning	Nanjing University	ACL'25	General	LLaMA3.1-8B
19 Feb 2025	Adapting Large Language Models for Time Series Modeling via a Novel Parameter-efficient Adaptation Method (Time-LlaMA)	Nanyang Technological University	ACL'25	General	Llama-2
17 Feb 2025	TimeCAP: Learning to Contextualize, Augment, and Predict Time Series Events with Large Language Model Agents[Code]	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology	AAAI'25	General	GPT-4, BERT
6 Feb 2025	Time-VLM: Exploring Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Time Series Forecasting	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)	ICML'25	General	ViLT, CLIP, BLIP-2
5 Feb 2025	SensorChat: Answering Qualitative and Quantitative Questions during Long-Term Multimodal Sensor Interactions[Code]	University of California San Diego	IMWUT'25	IoT	GPT-3.5-Turbo, LLaMA
27 Jan 2025	Smarter Together: Combining Large Language Models and Small Models for Physiological Signals Visual Inspection (ConMIL)[Code]	University of Arizona	JHIR'25	Medical	GPT-4, Qwen2-VL
8 Jan 2025	TS-TCD: Triplet-Level Cross-Modal Distillation for Time-Series Forecasting Using Large Language Models	East China Normal University	ICASSP'25	General	GPT-2
3 Jan 2025	Time Series Language Model for Descriptive Caption Generation (TSLM)	Nokia Bell Labs	Preprint	General	LLaMA-2
23 Dec 2024	VITRO: Vocabulary Inversion for Time-series Representation Optimization[Code]	University of Michigana	ICASSP'25	General	GPT-2, LLaMA
27 Nov 2024	LLM-ABBA: Understanding time series via symbolic approximation[Code]	Charles University	Preprint	General	Llama2, Mistral
24 Nov 2024	LeRet: Language-Empowered Retentive Network for Time Series Forecasting[Code]	University of Science and Technology of China	IJCAI'24	General	LLaMA
18 Nov 2024	Understanding the Role of Textual Prompts in LLM for Time Series Forecasting: an Adapter View	Alibaba	Preprint	General	GPT-2, LLaMA
5 Nov 2024	Learning Transferable Time Series Classifier with Cross-Domain Pre-training from Language Model (CrossTimeNet)[Code]	University of Science and Technology of China	Preprint	General	BERT, GPT-2
31 Oct 2024	AutoTimes: Autoregressive Time Series Forecasters via Large Language Models[Code]	Tsinghua University	NeurIPS'24	General	LLaMA, GPT-2, OPT
21 Oct 2024	LLM-TS Integrator: Integrating LLM for Enhanced Time Series Modeling	Borealis AI	Preprint	General	LLaMA
14 Oct 2024	SensorLLM: Aligning Large Language Models with Motion Sensors for Human Activity Recognition[Code]	University of New South Wales, Sydney	EMNLP'25	IoT	Llama3
8 Oct 2024	Time-FFM: Towards LM-Empowered Federated Foundation Model for Time Series Forecasting	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)	NeurIPS'24	General	GPT-2
23 Sep 2024	TS-HTFA: Advancing Time Series Forecasting via Hierarchical Text-Free Alignment with Large Language Models	East China Normal University	Preprint	General	GPT-2
30 Jul 2024	A federated large language model for long-term time series forecasting (FedTime)	Concordia Universit	Preprint	General	LLaMA
7 Jul 2024	S2IP-LLM: Semantic Space Informed Prompt Learning with LLM for Time Series Forecasting	University of Connecticut	ICML'24	General	GPT-2
3 Jun 2024	TimeCMA: Towards LLM-Empowered Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Cross-Modality Alignment[Code]	Nanyang Technological University	AAAI'25	General	GPT-2
4 May 2024	Can Brain Signals Reveal Inner Alignment with Human Languages? (MATM)[Code]	Carnegie Mellon University	EMNLP'23 Findings	Medical	BERT
24 Mar 2024	GPT4MTS: Prompt-Based Large Language Model for Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting	University of Southern California	AAAI'24	General	GPT-2, BERT
12 Mar 2024	Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series[Code]	AWS AI Labs	TMLR'24	General	GPT-2
23 Feb 2024	UniTime: A Language-Empowered Unified Model for Cross-Domain Time Series Forecasting[Code]	National University of Singapore	WWW'24	General	GPT-2
7 Feb 2024	Multi-Patch Prediction: Adapting LLMs for Time Series Representation Learning (aLLM4TS)	The Chinese University of Hong Kong	ICML'24	General	GPT-2
22 Feb 2024	TEST: Text Prototype Aligned Embedding to Activate LLM's Ability for Time Series[Code]	Peking University	ICLR'24	General	BERT, GPT-2, ChatGLM
30 Jan 2025	Large Language Models are Few-shot Multivariate Time Series Classifiers (LLMFew)	University of Technology Sydney	Preprint	General	GPT-2, GPT-4
29 Jan 2024	Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models[Code]	Monash University	ICLR'24	General	LLaMA
26 Jan 2024	Large Language Model Guided Knowledge Distillation for Time Series Anomaly Detection (AnomalyLLM)	Zhejiang University	IJCAI'24	General	GPT-2
9 Oct 2023	Integrating Stock Features and Global Information via Large Language Models for Enhanced Stock Return Prediction (SCRL-LG)	Hithink Royal Flush Information Network	IJCAI'23	Financial	LLaMA
25 Sep 2023	DeWave: Discrete EEG Waves Encoding for Brain Dynamics to Text Translation[Code]	University of Technology Sydney	NeurIPS'23	Medical	BART
22 Mar 2023	Frozen Language Model Helps ECG Zero-Shot Learning (METS)	Jilin University	MIDL'23	Medical	BERT
6 Sep 2023	ETP: Learning Transferable ECG Representations via ECG-Text Pre-training	Imperial College London	ICASSP'24	Medical	BERT
21 Jan 2023	Transfer Knowledge from Natural Language to Electrocardiography: Can We Detect Cardiovascular Disease Through Language Models? (ECG-LLM)	Carnegie Mellon University	EACL'23 Findings	Medical	BERT, BART

Internal:

Date	Paper	Institute	Publication	Domain	LLMs
20 Jan 2026	TimeART: Towards Agentic Time Series Reasoning via Tool-Augmentation	East China Normal University	Preprint	General	Qwen-3, GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0
6 Jan 2026	STReasoner: Empowering LLMs for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Time Series via Spatial-Aware Reinforcement Learning[Code]	Emory University	ACL'26	General	GPT-5.2, Claude-4.5, Qwen3-8B
29 Dec 2025	Alpha-R1: Alpha Screening with LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning[Code]	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	Preprint	General	Qwen3-8B
9 Nov 2025	TimeSense: Making Large Language Models Proficient in Time-Series Analysis	Tsinghua University	Preprint	General	Qwen3-8B, GPT-5
16 Apr 2025	ChatTS: Aligning Time Series with LLMs via Synthetic Data for Enhanced Understanding and Reasoning[Code]	Tsinghua University	VLDB'25	General	QWen-2.5
16 Apr 2025	ECG-Chat: A Large ECG-Language Model for Cardiac Disease Diagnosis[Code]	China University of Geosciences	ICME'25	Medical	GPT-4, Vicuna-13B
16 Dec 2024	ChatTime: A Unified Multimodal Time Series Foundation Model Bridging Numerical and Textual Data[Code]	Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications	AAAI'25	General	LLaMA-2
13 Aug 2024	GenG: An LLM-Based Generic Time Series Data Generation Approach for Edge Intelligence via Cross-Domain Collaboration	Future Network Research Center, Purple Mountain Laboratories	INFOCOM'24	IoT	LLaMA
19 Mar 2024	Advancing Time Series Classification with Multimodal Language Modeling (InstructTime)[Code]	University of Science and Technology of China	WSDM'25	General	GPT-2
21 Dec 2023	BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance	Bloomberg	Preprint	Financial	GPT-NeoX, OPT, BLOOM

Survey:

Date	Paper	Institute	Publication
5 Nov 2025	A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models[Code]	University of California	Preprint
2 Oct 2025	How Can Time Series Analysis Benefit From Multiple Modalities? A Survey and Outlook[Code]	Georgia Institute of Technology	Preprint
1 Sep 2025	When LLM Meets Time Series: Can LLMs Perform Multi-Step Time Series Reasoning and Inference[Code]	University of Southern California	Preprint
5 May 2025	Towards Cross-Modality Modeling for Time Series Analytics: A Survey in the LLM Era[Code]	Nanyang Technological University	IJCAI'25
17 Mar 2025	Multi-modal Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey[Code]	University of Connecticut	KDD'25
12 Mar 2025	Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Science: A Tutorial and Survey	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)	KDD'25
3 Feb 2025	Position: Empowering Time Series Reasoning with Multimodal LLMs[Code]	University of Oxford	Preprint
21 Mar 2024	Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)	KDD'24
5 Feb 2024	Empowering Time Series Analysis with Large Language Models: A Survey	University of Connecticut, USA	IJCAI'24
5 Feb 2024	Position: What Can Large Language Models Tell Us about Time Series Analysis	Griffith University	ICML'24
2 Feb 2024	Large Language Models for Time Series: A Survey[Code]	University of California, San Diego	IJCAI'24
16 Oct 2023	Large Models for Time Series and Spatio-Temporal Data: A Survey and Outlook[Code]	Monash University	Preprint
18 May 2023	A Survey on Time-Series Pre-Trained Models[Code]	South China University of Technology	TKDE'24
3 May 2023	A Survey of Time Series Foundation Models: Generalizing Time Series Representation with Large Language Model	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Preprint

Dataset:

Date	Paper	Institute	Publication	Domain	LLMs
7 Nov 2025	QuAnTS: Question Answering on Time Series[Code]	TU Darmstadt	Preprint	IoT	Llama3.1-8B
28 Jun 2025	Time-MQA: Time Series Multi-Task Question Answering with Context Enhancement[Code]	University of Oxford	ACL'25	General	Mistral-7B
25 Jun 2025	ITFormer: Bridging Time Series and Natural Language for Multi-Modal QA with Large-Scale Multitask Dataset[Code]	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	ICML'25	General	GPT-4o, Gemini-Pro
5 Jun 2025	Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information (CiK)[Code]	ServiceNow Research	ICML'25	General	Qwen-2.5-7B, Llama-3-70B, Llama-3.1-405B
21 Mar 2025	MTBench: A Multimodal Time Series Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning and Question Answering[Code]	Yale University	Preprint	Financial	GPT-4o, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Llama3.1
13 Mar 2025	Chat-TS: Enhancing Multi-Modal Reasoning Over Time-Series and Natural Language Data	Queen’s University	Preprint	General	LLama 3.1-8B
3 Mar 2025	SensorQA: A Question Answering Benchmark for Daily-Life Monitoring[Code]	Georgia Institute of Technology	SenSys'25	IoT	GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4-Turbo
18 Oct 2024	TimeSeriesExam: A time series understanding exam[Code]	Carnegie Mellon University	NeurIPS'24 Workshop	General	GPT-4o, Gemini, Phi3.5
12 Jun 2024	Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysis[Code]	Georgia Institute of Technology	NeurIPS'24	General	LLaMA-3, GPT-2
17 Apr 2024	Language Models Still Struggle to Zero-shot Reason about Time Series (TSandLanguage)[Code]	University of Washington	EMNLP'24 (Findings)	General	GPT-4
28 Oct 2023	Insight Miner: A Time Series Analysis Dataset for Cross-Domain Alignment with Natural Language	University of California, Berkeley	NeurIPS'23 Workshop	General	LLaVA, GPT-4
27 Oct 2023	JoLT: Jointly Learned Representations of Language and Time-Series	Carnegie Mellon University	NeurIPS'23 Workshop	Medical	GPT-2, OPT

Citation

If you find this useful, please cite our paper: "From Time Series Analysis to Question Answering: A Survey in the LLM Era".

@article{li2026tsa2tsqa,
      title={From Time Series Analysis to Question Answering: A Survey in the LLM Era}, 
      author={Wei Li and Zhe Xie and Yuxuan Liang and Xinli Hao and Yunyao Cheng and Dan Pei and Xiaofeng Meng},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.11512},
      year={2026}
}

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TSA-TSQA-with-LLMs

项目介绍