ChatTS: Aligning Time Series with LLMs via Synthetic Data for Enhanced Understanding and Reasoning

Understanding time series is crucial for its application in real-world scenarios. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly applied to time series tasks, leveraging their strong language capabilities to enhance various applications. However, research on multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for time series understanding and reasoning remains limited, primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets that align time series with textual information. This paper introduces ChatTS, a novel MLLM designed for time series analysis. ChatTS treats time series as a modality, similar to how vision MLLMs process images, enabling it to perform both understanding and reasoning with time series. To address the scarcity of training data, we propose an attribute-based method for generating synthetic time series with detailed attribute descriptions. We further introduce Time Series Evol-Instruct, a novel approach that generates diverse time series Q&As, enhancing the model's reasoning capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, ChatTS is the first MLLM that takes multivariate time series as input, which is fine-tuned exclusively on synthetic datasets. We evaluate its performance using benchmark datasets with real-world data, including six alignment tasks and four reasoning tasks. Our results show that ChatTS significantly outperforms existing vision-based MLLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) and text/agent-based LLMs, achieving a 46.0% improvement in alignment tasks and a 25.8% improvement in reasoning tasks.

A Dynamic Linear Bias Incorporation Scheme for Nonnegative Latent Factor Analysis

High-Dimensional and Incomplete (HDI) data is commonly encountered in big data-related applications like social network services systems, which are concerning the limited interactions among numerous nodes. Knowledge acquisition from HDI data is a vital issue in the domain of data science due to their embedded rich patterns like node behaviors, where the fundamental task is to perform HDI data representation learning. Nonnegative Latent Factor Analysis (NLFA) models have proven to possess the superiority to address this issue, where a linear bias incorporation (LBI) scheme is important in present the training overshooting and fluctuation, as well as preventing the model from premature convergence. However, existing LBI schemes are all statistic ones where the linear biases are fixed, which significantly restricts the scalability of the resultant NLFA model and results in loss of representation learning ability to HDI data. Motivated by the above discoveries, this paper innovatively presents the dynamic linear bias incorporation (DLBI) scheme. It firstly extends the linear bias vectors into matrices, and then builds a binary weight matrix to switch the active/inactive states of the linear biases. The weight matrix's each entry switches between the binary states dynamically corresponding to the linear bias value variation, thereby establishing the dynamic linear biases for an NLFA model. Empirical studies on three HDI datasets from real applications demonstrate that the proposed DLBI-based NLFA model obtains higher representation accuracy several than state-of-the-art models do, as well as highly-competitive computational efficiency.

Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network : A Survey

Since existing mobile communication networks may not be able to meet the low latency and high-efficiency requirements of emerging technologies and applications, novel network architectures need to be investigated to support these new requirements. As a new network architecture that integrates satellite systems, air networks and ground communication, Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network (SAGIN) has attracted extensive attention in recent years. This paper summarizes the recent research work on SAGIN from several aspects, with the basic information of SAGIN first introduced, followed by the physical characteristics. Then the drive and prospects of the current SAGIN architecture in supporting new requirements are deeply analyzed. On this basis, the requirements and challenges are analyzed. Finally, it summarizes the existing solutions and prospects the future research directions.

Proximal Symmetric Non-negative Latent Factor Analysis: A Novel Approach to Highly-Accurate Representation of Undirected Weighted Networks

An Undirected Weighted Network (UWN) is commonly found in big data-related applications. Note that such a network's information connected with its nodes, and edges can be expressed as a Symmetric, High-Dimensional and Incomplete (SHDI) matrix. However, existing models fail in either modeling its intrinsic symmetry or low-data density, resulting in low model scalability or representation learning ability. For addressing this issue, a Proximal Symmetric Nonnegative Latent-factor-analysis (PSNL) model is proposed. It incorporates a proximal term into symmetry-aware and data density-oriented objective function for high representation accuracy. Then an adaptive Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM)-based learning scheme is implemented through a Tree-structured of Parzen Estimators (TPE) method for high computational efficiency. Empirical studies on four UWNs demonstrate that PSNL achieves higher accuracy gain than state-of-the-art models, as well as highly competitive computational efficiency.

Multi-constrained Symmetric Nonnegative Latent Factor Analysis for Accurately Representing Large-scale Undirected Weighted Networks

An Undirected Weighted Network (UWN) is frequently encountered in a big-data-related application concerning the complex interactions among numerous nodes, e.g., a protein interaction network from a bioinformatics application. A Symmetric High-Dimensional and Incomplete (SHDI) matrix can smoothly illustrate such an UWN, which contains rich knowledge like node interaction behaviors and local complexes. To extract desired knowledge from an SHDI matrix, an analysis model should carefully consider its symmetric-topology for describing an UWN's intrinsic symmetry. Representation learning to an UWN borrows the success of a pyramid of symmetry-aware models like a Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SNMF) model whose objective function utilizes a sole Latent Factor (LF) matrix for representing SHDI's symmetry rigorously. However, they suffer from the following drawbacks: 1) their computational complexity is high; and 2) their modeling strategy narrows their representation features, making them suffer from low learning ability. Aiming at addressing above critical issues, this paper proposes a Multi-constrained Symmetric Nonnegative Latent-factor-analysis (MSNL) model with two-fold ideas: 1) introducing multi-constraints composed of multiple LF matrices, i.e., inequality and equality ones into a data-density-oriented objective function for precisely representing the intrinsic symmetry of an SHDI matrix with broadened feature space; and 2) implementing an Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM)-incorporated learning scheme for precisely solving such a multi-constrained model. Empirical studies on three SHDI matrices from a real bioinformatics or industrial application demonstrate that the proposed MSNL model achieves stronger representation learning ability to an SHDI matrix than state-of-the-art models do.

Position-Aware Subgraph Neural Networks with Data-Efficient Learning

Data-efficient learning on graphs (GEL) is essential in real-world applications. Existing GEL methods focus on learning useful representations for nodes, edges, or entire graphs with ``small'' labeled data. But the problem of data-efficient learning for subgraph prediction has not been explored. The challenges of this problem lie in the following aspects: 1) It is crucial for subgraphs to learn positional features to acquire structural information in the base graph in which they exist. Although the existing subgraph neural network method is capable of learning disentangled position encodings, the overall computational complexity is very high. 2) Prevailing graph augmentation methods for GEL, including rule-based, sample-based, adaptive, and automated methods, are not suitable for augmenting subgraphs because a subgraph contains fewer nodes but richer information such as position, neighbor, and structure. Subgraph augmentation is more susceptible to undesirable perturbations. 3) Only a small number of nodes in the base graph are contained in subgraphs, which leads to a potential ``bias'' problem that the subgraph representation learning is dominated by these ``hot'' nodes. By contrast, the remaining nodes fail to be fully learned, which reduces the generalization ability of subgraph representation learning. In this paper, we aim to address the challenges above and propose a Position-Aware Data-Efficient Learning framework for subgraph neural networks called PADEL. Specifically, we propose a novel node position encoding method that is anchor-free, and design a new generative subgraph augmentation method based on a diffused variational subgraph autoencoder, and we propose exploratory and exploitable views for subgraph contrastive learning. Extensive experiment results on three real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines.

An Unconstrained Symmetric Nonnegative Latent Factor Analysis for Large-scale Undirected Weighted Networks

Large-scale undirected weighted networks are usually found in big data-related research fields. It can naturally be quantified as a symmetric high-dimensional and incomplete (SHDI) matrix for implementing big data analysis tasks. A symmetric non-negative latent-factor-analysis (SNL) model is able to efficiently extract latent factors (LFs) from an SHDI matrix. Yet it relies on a constraint-combination training scheme, which makes it lack flexibility. To address this issue, this paper proposes an unconstrained symmetric nonnegative latent-factor-analysis (USNL) model. Its main idea is two-fold: 1) The output LFs are separated from the decision parameters via integrating a nonnegative mapping function into an SNL model; and 2) Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is adopted for implementing unconstrained model training along with ensuring the output LFs nonnegativity. Empirical studies on four SHDI matrices generated from real big data applications demonstrate that an USNL model achieves higher prediction accuracy of missing data than an SNL model, as well as highly competitive computational efficiency.

Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.