用计算代替大模型感知时间序列,提升语言描述准确性
Decoupling Perception from Description: Computation-Grounded Representation Alignment between Multivariate Time Series and Language

- 用确定性代码计算多变量时间序列统计特征,再由大模型描述
- 在多变量任务上超越更大模型,事实准确率提升35%以上
- 适合需要精确时序分析的金融、工业场景研究者
将时间序列与语言对齐的多模态训练陷入自监督陷阱:通常让大模型读取序列并生成描述,但标签质量受限于模型本应学习的感知能力,数据无法突破标注者的认知边界。此外,多数数据集仅含单变量,而关键模式(跨通道相关性、领先滞后结构、共现异常)需多变量才能显现,此时大模型的局限性暴露无遗。二者叠加导致三难困境:现有方法难以同时具备可靠性、真实性与可扩展性。本文通过解耦感知与描述实现突破:由确定性代码从真实开源多变量序列中计算一组统计量,再由大模型进行语言化表达。感知环节由计算完成,大模型专注表达。由此构建40亿参数的计算根基时序-语言模型CGTime。CGTime在多变量理解任务上优于更庞大的通用模型:在独立测试集上达到最佳多变量事实得分(0.283),显著高于GPT-4o-mini(0.173)和GPT-5.4-nano(0.203),该差距在霍尔姆校正的配对显著性检验中均成立。生成描述中的可验证数值事实更准确,涵盖的统计特性范围更广。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Training multimodal models to align time series with language runs into a self-supervision trap. The usual recipe asks an LLM to read a series and write a description, so label quality is capped by the perceptual skill the model is supposed to learn. The data can never teach more than the labeler already knows. A second gap makes this worse: most datasets use a single variable, but the patterns that matter (cross-channel correlation, lead-lag structure, co-occurring anomalies) appear only with several variables, right where the labeling LLM's limits are most exposed. These two problems create a trilemma: existing methods are reliable, realistic, or scalable, but none achieves all three. We resolve this by decoupling perception from description. Deterministic code computes a set of statistics from real, open-source multivariate series; the LLM verbalizes those precomputed facts. Perception, which LLMs do poorly, is handled by computation, while the LLM handles expression. This produces CGTime, our 4B-parameter computation-grounded time-series-language model. CGTime outperforms far larger general-purpose models on multivariate understanding tasks: it attains the best multivariate fact score on our held-out benchmark (0.283 vs. 0.173 for GPT-4o-mini and 0.203 for GPT-5.4-nano), a gap that survives Holm-corrected paired significance tests against every baseline. It also states verifiable numerical facts in generated captions more accurately and covers a broader range of statistical properties.
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