ACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.1014 · 记录 #1

Markovian Linguistic-Temporal Bridge: Unlocking the Potential of LLMs for Time Series Forecasting

来源日期（仅到月份） 2026-07

来源记录日期 2026-07

雷达观测 2026-11-01 21:56

摘要

Adapting pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) for time series forecasting primarily relies on token-level linguistic-temporal alignment, leading to the stacking of logically disjointed tokens as input. While empirically effective, these methods overlook a fundamental capability of LLMs: modeling linguistic logic and structure, rather than merely processing token features. To address this limitation, we propose the \textbf{M}arkovian-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{S}tructure-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{A}lignment (\textbf{MGSAA}). Our core contribution is a framework that transcends pointwise feature matching to achieve global structural isomorphism between the linguistic and temporal domains. Specifically, MGSAA distills latent evolutionary patterns of language within LLMs into a Markovian state transition graph, which is transferred as a structural prior to the time series domain. Under this prior, time series patches are decoded into latent states and then aligned via state-constrained cross-attention. Ultimately, MGSAA generates a token sequence topologically isomorphic to the LLM’s inherent mental structure, reactivating its reasoning capabilities for forecasting. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MGSAA achieves state-of-the-art performance, providing an innovative solution for cross-modal alignment in LLM for time series forecasting. Code is available at https://github.com/sunzju/MGSAA.