ConvTimeNet: A Deep Hierarchical Fully Convolutional Model for Multivariate Time Series AnalysisMingyue Cheng, Jiqian Yang, Tingyue Pan et al.
Designing effective models for learning time series representations is foundational for time series analysis. Many previous works have explored time series representation modeling approaches and have made progress in this area. Despite their effectiveness, they lack adaptive perception of local patterns in temporally dependent basic units and fail to capture the multi-scale dependency among these units. Instead of relying on prevalent methods centered around self-attention mechanisms, we propose ConvTimeNet, a hierarchical pure convolutional model designed for time series analysis. ConvTimeNet introduces a deformable patch layer that adaptively perceives local patterns of temporally dependent basic units in a data-driven manner. Based on the extracted local patterns, hierarchical pure convolutional blocks are designed to capture dependency relationships among the representations of basic units at different scales. Moreover, a large kernel mechanism is employed to ensure that convolutional blocks can be deeply stacked, thereby achieving a larger receptive field. In this way, local patterns and their multi-scale dependencies can be effectively modeled within a single model. Extensive experiments comparing a wide range of different types of models demonstrate that pure convolutional models still exhibit strong viability, effectively addressing the aforementioned two challenges and showing superior performance across multiple tasks. The code is available for reproducibility.
13.4LGOct 24, 2024Code
Hierarchical Multimodal LLMs with Semantic Space Alignment for Enhanced Time Series ClassificationXiaoyu Tao, Tingyue Pan, Mingyue Cheng et al.
Leveraging large language models (LLMs) has garnered increasing attention and introduced novel perspectives in time series classification. However, existing approaches often overlook the crucial dynamic temporal information inherent in time series data and face challenges in aligning this data with textual semantics. To address these limitations, we propose HiTime, a hierarchical multi-modal model that seamlessly integrates temporal information into LLMs for multivariate time series classification (MTSC). Our model employs a hierarchical feature encoder to capture diverse aspects of time series data through both data-specific and task-specific embeddings. To facilitate semantic space alignment between time series and text, we introduce a dual-view contrastive alignment module that bridges the gap between modalities. Additionally, we adopt a hybrid prompting strategy to fine-tune the pre-trained LLM in a parameter-efficient manner. By effectively incorporating dynamic temporal features and ensuring semantic alignment, HiTime enables LLMs to process continuous time series data and achieves state-of-the-art classification performance through text generation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HiTime significantly enhances time series classification accuracy compared to most competitive baseline methods. Our findings highlight the potential of integrating temporal features into LLMs, paving the way for advanced time series analysis. The code is publicly available for further research and validation. Our codes are publicly available1.
6.0AIJan 15
PaperScout: An Autonomous Agent for Academic Paper Search with Process-Aware Sequence-Level Policy OptimizationTingyue Pan, Jie Ouyang, Mingyue Cheng et al.
Academic paper search is a fundamental task in scientific research, yet most existing approaches rely on rigid, predefined workflows that struggle with complex, conditional queries. To address this limitation, we propose PaperScout, an autonomous agent that reformulates paper search as a sequential decision-making process. Unlike static workflows, PaperScout dynamically decides whether, when, and how to invoke search and expand tools based on accumulated retrieval context. However, training such agents presents a fundamental challenge: standard reinforcement learning methods, typically designed for single-turn tasks, suffer from a granularity mismatch when applied to multi-turn agentic tasks, where token-level optimization diverges from the granularity of sequence-level interactions, leading to noisy credit assignment. We introduce Proximal Sequence Policy Optimization (PSPO), a process-aware, sequence-level policy optimization method that aligns optimization with agent-environment interaction. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PaperScout significantly outperforms strong workflow-driven and RL baselines in both recall and relevance, validating the effectiveness of our adaptive agentic framework and optimization strategy.
Multimodal Forecasting of Sparse Intraoperative Hypotension Events Powered by Language ModelJintao Zhang, Zirui Liu, Mingyue Cheng et al.
Intraoperative hypotension (IOH) frequently occurs under general anesthesia and is strongly linked to adverse outcomes such as myocardial injury and increased mortality. Despite its significance, IOH prediction is hindered by event sparsity and the challenge of integrating static and dynamic data across diverse patients. In this paper, we propose \textbf{IOHFuseLM}, a multimodal language model framework. To accurately identify and differentiate sparse hypotensive events, we leverage a two-stage training strategy. The first stage involves domain adaptive pretraining on IOH physiological time series augmented through diffusion methods, thereby enhancing the model sensitivity to patterns associated with hypotension. Subsequently, task fine-tuning is performed on the original clinical dataset to further enhance the ability to distinguish normotensive from hypotensive states. To enable multimodal fusion for each patient, we align structured clinical descriptions with the corresponding physiological time series at the token level. Such alignment enables the model to capture individualized temporal patterns alongside their corresponding clinical semantics. In addition, we convert static patient attributes into structured text to enrich personalized information. Experimental evaluations on two intraoperative datasets demonstrate that IOHFuseLM outperforms established baselines in accurately identifying IOH events, highlighting its applicability in clinical decision support scenarios. Our code is publicly available to promote reproducibility at https://github.com/zjt-gpu/IOHFuseLM.
12.7IRJun 18
ScholarQuest: A Taxonomy-Guided Benchmark for Agentic Academic Paper Search in Open Literature EnvironmentsTingyue Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Daoyu Wang et al.
Academic paper search is a core step in scientific research, and LLM-based search agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for iterative, intent-driven literature exploration. However, existing benchmarks are insufficient for systematically evaluating agentic academic search under realistic open literature environments. We propose ScholarQuest, a large-scale, taxonomy-guided benchmark for agentic academic paper search. ScholarQuest is constructed from over 1,000 computer science topics and four representative research intents, including method-oriented, setting-anchored, comparison-based, and scope-controlled queries. It further provides scalable answer construction and a shared retrieval backend ScholarBase for reproducible evaluation. Benchmarking results show that agentic methods outperform single-shot retrieval baselines, yet the best-performing agent only achieves 0.314 Recall@100 and 0.355 Recall@All, indicating substantial room for improvement. In addition, analyses of search efficiency, intent-level robustness, and failure cases further highlight the benchmark's ability to provide multi-dimensional evaluation signals for academic paper search agents.