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From Images to Signals: Are Large Vision Models Useful for Time Series Analysis?

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arxiv 2505.24030 v2 pith:TVEY5INM submitted 2025-05-29 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CV

From Images to Signals: Are Large Vision Models Useful for Time Series Analysis?

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CV
keywords seriestimelvmsmodelsanalysisforecastinglargeuseful
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Transformer-based models have gained increasing attention in time series research, driving interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) and foundation models for time series analysis. As the field moves toward multi-modality, Large Vision Models (LVMs) are emerging as a promising direction. In the past, the effectiveness of Transformer and LLMs in time series has been debated. When it comes to LVMs, a similar question arises: are LVMs truely useful for time series analysis? To address it, we design and conduct the first principled study involving 4 LVMs, 8 imaging methods, 18 datasets and 26 baselines across both high-level (classification) and low-level (forecasting) tasks, with extensive ablation analysis. Our findings indicate LVMs are indeed useful for time series classification but face challenges in forecasting. Although effective, the contemporary best LVM forecasters are limited to specific types of LVMs and imaging methods, exhibit a bias toward forecasting periods, and have limited ability to utilize long look-back windows. We hope our findings could serve as a cornerstone for future research on LVM- and multimodal-based solutions to different time series tasks.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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