{"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/small-but-mighty-enhancing-time-series","title":"Small but Mighty: Enhancing Time Series Forecasting with Lightweight LLMs","arxiv_id":"2503.03594","date":"2025-03-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Haoran Fan","Bin Li","Yixuan Weng","Shoujun Zhou"],"abstract":"While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable potential in time series forecasting, their practical deployment remains constrained by excessive computational demands and memory footprints. Existing LLM-based approaches typically suffer from three critical limitations: Inefficient parameter utilization in handling numerical time series patterns; Modality misalignment between continuous temporal signals and discrete text embeddings; and Inflexibility for real-time expert knowledge integration. We present SMETimes, the first systematic investigation of sub-3B parameter SLMs for efficient and accurate time series forecasting. Our approach centers on three key innovations: A statistically-enhanced prompting mechanism that bridges numerical time series with textual semantics through descriptive statistical features; A adaptive fusion embedding architecture that aligns temporal patterns with language model token spaces through learnable parameters; And a dynamic mixture-of-experts framework enabled by SLMs' computational efficiency, adaptively combining base predictions with domain-specific models. Extensive evaluations across seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that our 3B-parameter SLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on five primary datasets while maintaining 3.8x faster training and 5.2x lower memory consumption compared to 7B-parameter LLM baselines. Notably, the proposed model exhibits better learning capabilities, achieving 12.3% lower MSE than conventional LLM. Ablation studies validate that our statistical prompting and cross-modal fusion modules respectively contribute 15.7% and 18.2% error reduction in long-horizon forecasting tasks. By redefining the efficiency-accuracy trade-off landscape, this work establishes SLMs as viable alternatives to resource-intensive LLMs for practical time series forecasting. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xiyan1234567/SMETimes.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03594v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03594v1.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":"small-but-mighty-enhancing-time-series","repo_url":"https://github.com/xiyan1234567/smetimes","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"computational-efficiency","task_name":"Computational Efficiency"},{"task_slug":"descriptive","task_name":"Descriptive"},{"task_slug":"mixture-of-experts","task_name":"Mixture-of-Experts"},{"task_slug":"time-series-1","task_name":"Time Series"},{"task_slug":"time-series-forecasting","task_name":"Time Series Forecasting"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"base","method_name":"BASE"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}