Zero-Shot Time-Series Question Answering via Decoupled Perception and Reasoning

Jing Xie; Haochen Yuan; Yunbo Wang

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.04942

Zero-Shot Time-Series Question Answering via Decoupled Perception and Reasoning

Jing Xie·Haochen Yuan·Yunbo Wang

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Time-series question answering (TSQA) requires grounding linguistic queries and diverse answer formats in complex numerical observations. However, existing methods heavily overfit to specific datasets and struggle to generalize when input series, question contexts, and answer requirements shift simultaneously. To address this challenge, we propose TSHarness, an agentic framework that establishes a decoupled workflow for cross-dataset zero-shot TSQA. At its core, TSHarness divides and conquers numerical perception and contextual reasoning via a structured Time-Series Perception State (TPS). Guided by a reusable memory of analytical knowledge, a learned Tool Selector adaptively invokes numerical tools to extract salient statistical and temporal features into the TPS. The answering agent then performs semantic reasoning over the TPS to generate target outputs, triggering iterative re-perception through the feedback loop when evidence is deemed insufficient. By separating numerical feature extraction from question-specific reasoning, TSHarness eliminates the need for target-side training or answer feedback, providing a generalizable, cost-efficient foundation for zero-shot TSQA.

Explore related subjects

cs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Jing Xie, Haochen Yuan, Yunbo Wang. 2026-10-04. Zero-Shot Time-Series Question Answering via Decoupled Perception and Reasoning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04942

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

When Explanations Compete: Policy-Aware Selection Under Uncertainty

Uncertainty-aware explanation methods often produce several alternatives for the same prediction. Selecting among them requires a policy for balancing prediction confidence, uncertainty, and application constraints. This paper presents a framework for applying such policies to a fixed set of generated explanations. Candidates are characterised by uncertainty change, prediction direction, and, when available, interval position relative to a decision boundary. The framework combines these properties with eligibility rules, optional bidirectional Pareto screening, and policy-aware ranking. A fictitious prostate-cancer example illustrates how different explanatory purposes lead to different selections from the same candidate set. We instantiate the framework with Calibrated Explanations for classification, thresholded regression, and plain regression. Across 41 benchmark datasets, mean candidate counts range from 11.57 to 21.75 for single-feature explanations and from $29.48$ to $69.53$ when conjunctions are included. Equal-weight and confidence-only policies yield an average selection-disagreement rate of $28.7\%$ while favouring the same confidence direction. A supporting $δ$-CLUE experiment demonstrates use with a second generator. By making the selection policy explicit, the framework allows applications to compare and prioritise explanations according to their intended use.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DrugMCTS: a drug repurposing framework combining multi-agent, RAG and Monte Carlo Tree Search

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated considerable potential in scientific domains such as drug repositioning. However, their effectiveness remains constrained when reasoning extends beyond the knowledge acquired during pretraining. Conventional approaches, such as fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented generation, face limitations in either imposing high computational overhead or failing to fully exploit structured scientific data. To overcome these challenges, we propose DrugMCTS, a novel framework that synergistically integrates RAG, multi-agent collaboration, and Monte Carlo Tree Search for drug repositioning. The framework employs five specialized agents tasked with retrieving and analyzing molecular and protein information, thereby enabling structured and iterative reasoning. Extensive experiments on the DrugBank and KIBA datasets demonstrate that DrugMCTS achieves substantially higher recall and robustness compared to both general-purpose LLMs and deep learning baselines. Our results highlight the importance of structured reasoning, agent-based collaboration, and feedback-driven search mechanisms in advancing LLM applications for drug repositioning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

PuzzleJAX: A Benchmark for Reasoning and Learning

We introduce PuzzleJAX, a GPU-accelerated puzzle game engine and description language designed to support rapid benchmarking of tree search, reinforcement learning, and LLM reasoning abilities. Unlike existing GPU-accelerated learning environments that provide hard-coded implementations of fixed sets of games, PuzzleJAX allows dynamic compilation of any game expressible in its domain-specific language (DSL). This DSL follows PuzzleScript, which is a popular and accessible online game engine for designing puzzle games. In this paper, we validate in PuzzleJAX several hundred of the thousands of games designed in PuzzleScript by both professional designers and casual creators since its release in 2013, thereby demonstrating PuzzleJAX's coverage of an expansive, expressive, and human-relevant space of tasks. By analyzing the performance of search, learning, and language models on these games, we show that PuzzleJAX can naturally express tasks that are both simple and intuitive to understand, yet often deeply challenging to master, requiring a combination of control, planning, and high-level insight.

cs.AI↗