{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/prioritizing-alignment-paradigms-over-task","title":"Prioritizing Alignment Paradigms over Task-Specific Model Customization in Time-Series LLMs","arxiv_id":"2506.11512","date":"2025-06-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Wei Li","Yunyao Cheng","Xinli Hao","Chaohong Ma","Yuxuan Liang","Bin Yang","Christian S. Jensen","Xiaofeng Meng"],"abstract":"Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled unprecedented capabilities for time-series reasoning in diverse real-world applications, including medical, financial, and spatio-temporal domains. However, existing approaches typically focus on task-specific model customization, such as forecasting and anomaly detection, while overlooking the data itself, referred to as time-series primitives, which are essential for in-depth reasoning. This position paper advocates a fundamental shift in approaching time-series reasoning with LLMs: prioritizing alignment paradigms grounded in the intrinsic primitives of time series data over task-specific model customization. This realignment addresses the core limitations of current time-series reasoning approaches, which are often costly, inflexible, and inefficient, by systematically accounting for intrinsic structure of data before task engineering. To this end, we propose three alignment paradigms: Injective Alignment, Bridging Alignment, and Internal Alignment, which are emphasized by prioritizing different aspects of time-series primitives: domain, characteristic, and representation, respectively, to activate time-series reasoning capabilities of LLMs to enable economical, flexible, and efficient reasoning. We further recommend that practitioners adopt an alignment-oriented method to avail this instruction to select an appropriate alignment paradigm. Additionally, we categorize relevant literature into these alignment paradigms and outline promising research directions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11512v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11512v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"prioritizing-alignment-paradigms-over-task","repo_url":"https://github.com/leeway-95/aligning-tsd-with-llm","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"anomaly-detection","task_name":"Anomaly Detection"},{"task_slug":"time-series-1","task_name":"Time Series"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adopt","method_name":"ADOPT"},{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}