Time to Embed: Unlocking Foundation Models for Time Series with Channel Descriptions

Traditional time series models are task-specific and often depend on dataset-specific training and extensive feature engineering. While Transformer-based architectures have improved scalability, foundation models, commonplace in text, vision, and audio, remain under-explored for time series and are largely restricted to forecasting. We introduce $\textbf{CHARM}$, a foundation embedding model for multivariate time series that learns shared, transferable, and domain-aware representations. To address the unique difficulties of time series foundation learning, $\textbf{CHARM}$ incorporates architectural innovations that integrate channel-level textual descriptions while remaining invariant to channel order. The model is trained using a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), with novel augmentation schemes and a loss function designed to improve interpretability and training stability. Our $7$M-parameter model achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse downstream tasks, setting a new benchmark for time series representation learning.

Liner Shipping Network Design with Reinforcement Learning

This paper proposes a novel reinforcement learning framework to address the Liner Shipping Network Design Problem (LSNDP), a challenging combinatorial optimization problem focused on designing cost-efficient maritime shipping routes. Traditional methods for solving the LSNDP typically involve decomposing the problem into sub-problems, such as network design and multi-commodity flow, which are then tackled using approximate heuristics or large neighborhood search (LNS) techniques. In contrast, our approach employs a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm on the network design, integrated with a heuristic-based multi-commodity flow solver, to produce competitive results on the publicly available LINERLIB benchmark. Additionally, our method also demonstrates generalization capabilities by producing competitive solutions on the benchmark instances after training on perturbed instances.

Functional Connectivity Methods for EEG-based Biometrics on a Large, Heterogeneous Dataset

This study examines the utility of functional connectivity (FC) and graph-based (GB) measures with a support vector machine classifier for use in electroencephalogram (EEG) based biometrics. Although FC-based features have been used in biometric applications, studies assessing the identification algorithms on heterogeneous and large datasets are scarce. This work investigates the performance of FC and GB metrics on a dataset of 184 subjects formed by pooling three datasets recorded under different protocols and acquisition systems. The results demonstrate the higher discriminatory power of FC than GB metrics. The identification accuracy increases with higher frequency EEG bands, indicating the enhanced uniqueness of the neural signatures in beta and gamma bands. Using all the 56 EEG channels common to the three databases, the best identification accuracy of 97.4% is obtained using phase-locking value (PLV) based measures extracted from the gamma frequency band. Further, we investigate the effect of the length of the analysis epoch to determine the data acquisition time required to obtain satisfactory identification accuracy. When the number of channels is reduced to 21 from 56, there is a marginal reduction of 2.4% only in the identification accuracy using PLV features in the gamma band. Additional experiments have been conducted to study the effect of the cognitive state of the subject and mismatched train/test conditions on the performance of the system.