Time-VLM: Exploring Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Time Series Forecasting

Recent advancements in time series forecasting have explored augmenting models with text or vision modalities to improve accuracy. While text provides contextual understanding, it often lacks fine-grained temporal details. Conversely, vision captures intricate temporal patterns but lacks semantic context, limiting the complementary potential of these modalities. To address this, we propose Time-VLM, a novel multimodal framework that leverages pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge temporal, visual, and textual modalities for enhanced forecasting. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a Retrieval-Augmented Learner, which extracts enriched temporal features through memory bank interactions; (2) a Vision-Augmented Learner, which encodes time series as informative images; and (3) a Text-Augmented Learner, which generates contextual textual descriptions. These components collaborate with frozen pre-trained VLMs to produce multimodal embeddings, which are then fused with temporal features for final prediction. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate that Time-VLM achieves superior performance, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios, thereby establishing a new direction for multimodal time series forecasting.

Position: Empowering Time Series Reasoning with Multimodal LLMs

Understanding time series data is crucial for multiple real-world applications. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in time series tasks, current approaches often rely on numerical data alone, overlooking the multimodal nature of time-dependent information, such as textual descriptions, visual data, and audio signals. Moreover, these methods underutilize LLMs' reasoning capabilities, limiting the analysis to surface-level interpretations instead of deeper temporal and multimodal reasoning. In this position paper, we argue that multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) can enable more powerful and flexible reasoning for time series analysis, enhancing decision-making and real-world applications. We call on researchers and practitioners to leverage this potential by developing strategies that prioritize trust, interpretability, and robust reasoning in MLLMs. Lastly, we highlight key research directions, including novel reasoning paradigms, architectural innovations, and domain-specific applications, to advance time series reasoning with MLLMs.

GDformer: Going Beyond Subsequence Isolation for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection of multivariate time series is a challenging task, given the requirements of deriving a compact detection criterion without accessing the anomaly points. The existing methods are mainly based on reconstruction error or association divergence, which are both confined to isolated subsequences with limited horizons, hardly promising unified series-level criterion. In this paper, we propose the Global Dictionary-enhanced Transformer (GDformer) with a renovated dictionary-based cross attention mechanism to cultivate the global representations shared by all normal points in the entire series. Accordingly, the cross-attention maps reflect the correlation weights between the point and global representations, which naturally leads to the representation-wise similarity-based detection criterion. To foster more compact detection boundary, prototypes are introduced to capture the distribution of normal point-global correlation weights. GDformer consistently achieves state-of-the-art unsupervised anomaly detection performance on five real-world benchmark datasets. Further experiments validate the global dictionary has great transferability among various datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/yuppielqx/GDformer.

Global Semantic-Guided Sub-image Feature Weight Allocation in High-Resolution Large Vision-Language Models

As the demand for high-resolution image processing in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) grows, sub-image partitioning has become a popular approach for mitigating visual information loss associated with fixed-resolution processing. However, existing partitioning methods uniformly process sub-images, resulting in suboptimal image understanding. In this work, we reveal that the sub-images with higher semantic relevance to the entire image encapsulate richer visual information for preserving the model's visual understanding ability. Therefore, we propose the Global Semantic-guided Weight Allocator (GSWA) module, which dynamically allocates weights to sub-images based on their relative information density, emulating human visual attention mechanisms. This approach enables the model to focus on more informative regions, overcoming the limitations of uniform treatment. We integrate GSWA into the InternVL2-2B framework to create SleighVL, a lightweight yet high-performing model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SleighVL outperforms models with comparable parameters and remains competitive with larger models. Our work provides a promising direction for more efficient and contextually aware high-resolution image processing in LVLMs, advancing multimodal system development.

GraphAgent: Agentic Graph Language Assistant

Real-world data is represented in both structured (e.g., graph connections) and unstructured (e.g., textual, visual information) formats, encompassing complex relationships that include explicit links (such as social connections and user behaviors) and implicit interdependencies among semantic entities, often illustrated through knowledge graphs. In this work, we propose GraphAgent, an automated agent pipeline that addresses both explicit graph dependencies and implicit graph-enhanced semantic inter-dependencies, aligning with practical data scenarios for predictive tasks (e.g., node classification) and generative tasks (e.g., text generation). GraphAgent comprises three key components: (i) a Graph Generator Agent that builds knowledge graphs to reflect complex semantic dependencies; (ii) a Task Planning Agent that interprets diverse user queries and formulates corresponding tasks through agentic self-planning; and (iii) a Task Execution Agent that efficiently executes planned tasks while automating tool matching and invocation in response to user queries. These agents collaborate seamlessly, integrating language models with graph language models to uncover intricate relational information and data semantic dependencies. Through extensive experiments on various graph-related predictive and text generative tasks on diverse datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our GraphAgent across various settings. We have made our proposed GraphAgent open-source at: https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphAgent.

Training-free Heterogeneous Graph Condensation via Data Selection

Efficient training of large-scale heterogeneous graphs is of paramount importance in real-world applications. However, existing approaches typically explore simplified models to mitigate resource and time overhead, neglecting the crucial aspect of simplifying large-scale heterogeneous graphs from the data-centric perspective. Addressing this gap, HGCond introduces graph condensation (GC) in heterogeneous graphs and generates a small condensed graph for efficient model training. Despite its efficacy in graph generation, HGCond encounters two significant limitations. The first is low effectiveness, HGCond excessively relies on the simplest relay model for the condensation procedure, which restricts the ability to exert powerful Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) with flexible condensation ratio and limits the generalization ability. The second is low efficiency, HGCond follows the existing GC methods designed for homogeneous graphs and leverages the sophisticated optimization paradigm, resulting in a time-consuming condensing procedure. In light of these challenges, we present the first Training \underline{Free} Heterogeneous Graph Condensation method, termed FreeHGC, facilitating both efficient and high-quality generation of heterogeneous condensed graphs. Specifically, we reformulate the heterogeneous graph condensation problem as a data selection issue, offering a new perspective for assessing and condensing representative nodes and edges in the heterogeneous graphs. By leveraging rich meta-paths, we introduce a new, high-quality heterogeneous data selection criterion to select target-type nodes. Furthermore, two training-free condensation strategies for heterogeneous graphs are designed to condense and synthesize other-types nodes effectively.

Towards Scalable and Deep Graph Neural Networks via Noise Masking

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in many graph mining tasks. However, scaling them to large graphs is challenging due to the high computational and storage costs of repeated feature propagation and non-linear transformation during training. One commonly employed approach to address this challenge is model-simplification, which only executes the Propagation (P) once in the pre-processing, and Combine (C) these receptive fields in different ways and then feed them into a simple model for better performance. Despite their high predictive performance and scalability, these methods still face two limitations. First, existing approaches mainly focus on exploring different C methods from the model perspective, neglecting the crucial problem of performance degradation with increasing P depth from the data-centric perspective, known as the over-smoothing problem. Second, pre-processing overhead takes up most of the end-to-end processing time, especially for large-scale graphs. To address these limitations, we present random walk with noise masking (RMask), a plug-and-play module compatible with the existing model-simplification works. This module enables the exploration of deeper GNNs while preserving their scalability. Unlike the previous model-simplification works, we focus on continuous P and found that the noise existing inside each P is the cause of the over-smoothing issue, and use the efficient masking mechanism to eliminate them. Experimental results on six real-world datasets demonstrate that model-simplification works equipped with RMask yield superior performance compared to their original version and can make a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.

Efficient Large-Scale Traffic Forecasting with Transformers: A Spatial Data Management Perspective

Road traffic forecasting is crucial in real-world intelligent transportation scenarios like traffic dispatching and path planning in city management and personal traveling. Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) stand out as the mainstream solution in this task. Nevertheless, the quadratic complexity of remarkable dynamic spatial modeling-based STGNNs has become the bottleneck over large-scale traffic data. From the spatial data management perspective, we present a novel Transformer framework called PatchSTG to efficiently and dynamically model spatial dependencies for large-scale traffic forecasting with interpretability and fidelity. Specifically, we design a novel irregular spatial patching to reduce the number of points involved in the dynamic calculation of Transformer. The irregular spatial patching first utilizes the leaf K-dimensional tree (KDTree) to recursively partition irregularly distributed traffic points into leaf nodes with a small capacity, and then merges leaf nodes belonging to the same subtree into occupancy-equaled and non-overlapped patches through padding and backtracking. Based on the patched data, depth and breadth attention are used interchangeably in the encoder to dynamically learn local and global spatial knowledge from points in a patch and points with the same index of patches. Experimental results on four real world large-scale traffic datasets show that our PatchSTG achieves train speed and memory utilization improvements up to $10\times$ and $4\times$ with the state-of-the-art performance.

DRL4AOI: A DRL Framework for Semantic-aware AOI Segmentation in Location-Based Services

In Location-Based Services (LBS), such as food delivery, a fundamental task is segmenting Areas of Interest (AOIs), aiming at partitioning the urban geographical spaces into non-overlapping regions. Traditional AOI segmentation algorithms primarily rely on road networks to partition urban areas. While promising in modeling the geo-semantics, road network-based models overlooked the service-semantic goals (e.g., workload equality) in LBS service. In this paper, we point out that the AOI segmentation problem can be naturally formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which gradually chooses a nearby AOI for each grid in the current AOI's border. Based on the MDP, we present the first attempt to generalize Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for AOI segmentation, leading to a novel DRL-based framework called DRL4AOI. The DRL4AOI framework introduces different service-semantic goals in a flexible way by treating them as rewards that guide the AOI generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of DRL4AOI, we develop and release an AOI segmentation system. We also present a representative implementation of DRL4AOI - TrajRL4AOI - for AOI segmentation in the logistics service. It introduces a Double Deep Q-learning Network (DDQN) to gradually optimize the AOI generation for two specific semantic goals: i) trajectory modularity, i.e., maximize tightness of the trajectory connections within an AOI and the sparsity of connections between AOIs, ii) matchness with the road network, i.e., maximizing the matchness between AOIs and the road network. Quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. The code and system is publicly available at https://github.com/Kogler7/AoiOpt.

REFOL: Resource-Efficient Federated Online Learning for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Multiple federated learning (FL) methods are proposed for traffic flow forecasting (TFF) to avoid heavy-transmission and privacy-leaking concerns resulting from the disclosure of raw data in centralized methods. However, these FL methods adopt offline learning which may yield subpar performance, when concept drift occurs, i.e., distributions of historical and future data vary. Online learning can detect concept drift during model training, thus more applicable to TFF. Nevertheless, the existing federated online learning method for TFF fails to efficiently solve the concept drift problem and causes tremendous computing and communication overhead. Therefore, we propose a novel method named Resource-Efficient Federated Online Learning (REFOL) for TFF, which guarantees prediction performance in a communication-lightweight and computation-efficient way. Specifically, we design a data-driven client participation mechanism to detect the occurrence of concept drift and determine clients' participation necessity. Subsequently, we propose an adaptive online optimization strategy, which guarantees prediction performance and meanwhile avoids meaningless model updates. Then, a graph convolution-based model aggregation mechanism is designed, aiming to assess participants' contribution based on spatial correlation without importing extra communication and computing consumption on clients. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the superiority of REFOL in terms of prediction improvement and resource economization.