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Emadeldeen Eldele

Publications and source records attributed to Emadeldeen Eldele.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Adapting LLMs to Time Series Forecasting via Temporal Heterogeneity Modeling and Representation Alignment

Recent advances have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be effectively adapted for time series forecasting, revealing strong potential beyond natural language tasks. However, their performance remains constrained by two fundamental challenges: the inherent heterogeneity of temporal patterns and the modality gap between continuous numerical signals and discrete language representations. In this work, we propose \textbf{TALON} (Temporal-heterogeneity And Language-Oriented Network), a unified framework that enhances LLM-based forecasting by modeling temporal heterogeneity and promoting representation alignment. Specifically, we design a Heterogeneous Temporal Encoder that partitions multivariate time series into structurally coherent segments, enabling localized expert modeling across diverse temporal patterns. To bridge the modality gap, we introduce a Representation Alignment Module that projects temporal features toward LLM-compatible representations, making time series more amenable to LLMs and thereby unlocking their modeling potential, while eliminating the need for handcrafted prompts during inference. Extensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TALON achieves superior performance across all datasets, with average MSE improvements of up to 11% over recent state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining higher efficiency. These results underscore the effectiveness of incorporating both pattern-aware modeling and representation-level alignment when adapting LLMs for time series forecasting. The code is available at: https://github.com/syrGitHub/TALON.

cs.CL

InA-Probe: Instruction-Aware Active Probing for Time Series Forecasting with LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive potential for time series forecasting. However, existing methods predominantly rely on passive modality alignment or static task reprogramming, which often fail to capture fine-grained, non-stationary temporal patterns or to adapt to nuanced task intents. In this paper, we propose Instruction-aware Active Probing (InA-Probe), which shifts the paradigm from passive alignment toward an active, instruction-driven probing mechanism. Specifically, we design a Multi-Level Instruction Injection mechanism that enriches the model with both global task objectives and fine-grained, patch-level semantic priors. Building on this, an Adaptive Query Generation module produces sample-specific probes that are dynamically modulated by the temporal context. These probes are then refined through a dual-stage attention process: they first internalize task-specific intents via Instruction-Aware Self-Attention, and subsequently interrogate the projected temporal representations through Temporal Cross-Attention to extract salient patterns. Comprehensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks show that InA-Probe consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning and LLM-based baselines, excelling in both one-for-all generalization and zero-shot transfer while reducing forecasting error by up to 37\% in challenging cross-domain scenarios. Ablation studies further confirm that the synergy between adaptive querying and fine-grained instructions is key to unlocking the reasoning power of LLMs for complex time series.

cs.AI

MSA-CNN: A Lightweight Multi-Scale CNN with Attention for Sleep Stage Classification

Recent advancements in machine learning-based signal analysis, coupled with open data initiatives, have fuelled efforts in automatic sleep stage classification. Despite the proliferation of classification models, few have prioritised reducing model complexity, which is a crucial factor for practical applications. In this work, we introduce Multi-Scale and Attention Convolutional Neural Network (MSA-CNN), a lightweight architecture featuring as few as ~10,000 parameters. MSA-CNN leverages a novel multi-scale module employing complementary pooling to eliminate redundant filter parameters and dense convolutions. Model complexity is further reduced by separating temporal and spatial feature extraction and using cost-effective global spatial convolutions. This separation of tasks not only reduces model complexity but also mirrors the approach used by human experts in sleep stage scoring. We evaluated both small and large configurations of MSA-CNN against nine state-of-the-art baseline models across three public datasets, treating univariate and multivariate models separately. Our evaluation, based on repeated cross-validation and re-evaluation of all baseline models, demonstrated that the large MSA-CNN outperformed all baseline models on all three datasets in terms of accuracy and Cohen's kappa, despite its significantly reduced parameter count. Lastly, we explored various model variants and conducted an in-depth analysis of the key modules and techniques, providing deeper insights into the underlying mechanisms. The code for our models, baselines, and evaluation procedures is available at https://github.com/sgoerttler/MSA-CNN.

cs.LG

Entropy Guided Dynamic Patch Segmentation for Time Series Transformers

Patch-based transformers have emerged as efficient and improved long-horizon modeling architectures for time series modeling. Yet, existing approaches rely on temporally-agnostic patch construction, where arbitrary starting positions and fixed lengths fracture temporal coherence by splitting natural transitions across boundaries. This naive segmentation often disrupts short-term dependencies and weakens representation learning. We propose a novel Entropy-Guided Dynamic Patch Encoder (EntroPE), as a temporally informed framework that dynamically detects transition points via conditional entropy and dynamically places patch boundaries. This preserves temporal structure while retaining the computational benefits of patching. EntroPE consists of two key modules, namely an Entropy-based Dynamic Patcher (EDP) that applies information-theoretic criteria to locate natural temporal shifts and determine patch boundaries, and an Adaptive Patch Encoder (APE) that employs pooling and cross-attention to capture intra-patch dependencies and produce fixed-size latent representations. Extensive experiments on long-term forecasting, classification, and anomaly detection demonstrate that the proposed method improves both accuracy and efficiency, establishing entropy-guided dynamic patching as a promising new paradigm for time series modeling. Code is available at https://github.com/Sachithx/EntroPE.

cs.CV

A Unified Shape-Aware Foundation Model for Time Series Classification

Foundation models pre-trained on large-scale source datasets are reshaping the traditional training paradigm for time series classification. However, existing time series foundation models primarily focus on forecasting tasks and often overlook classification-specific challenges, such as modeling interpretable shapelets that capture class-discriminative temporal features. To bridge this gap, we propose UniShape, a unified shape-aware foundation model designed for time series classification. UniShape incorporates a shape-aware adapter that adaptively aggregates multiscale discriminative subsequences (shapes) into class tokens, effectively selecting the most relevant subsequence scales to enhance model interpretability. Meanwhile, a prototype-based pretraining module is introduced to jointly learn instance- and shape-level representations, enabling the capture of transferable shape patterns. Pre-trained on a large-scale multi-domain time series dataset comprising 1.89 million samples, UniShape exhibits superior generalization across diverse target domains. Experiments on 128 UCR datasets and 30 additional time series datasets demonstrate that UniShape achieves state-of-the-art classification performance, with interpretability and ablation analyses further validating its effectiveness.

cs.LG

UniFault: A Fault Diagnosis Foundation Model from Bearing Data

Machine fault diagnosis (FD) is a critical task for predictive maintenance, enabling early fault detection and preventing unexpected failures. Despite its importance, existing FD models are operation-specific with limited generalization across diverse datasets. Foundation models (FM) have demonstrated remarkable potential in both visual and language domains, achieving impressive generalization capabilities even with minimal data through few-shot or zero-shot learning. However, translating these advances to FD presents unique hurdles. Unlike the large-scale, cohesive datasets available for images and text, FD datasets are typically smaller and more heterogeneous, with significant variations in sampling frequencies and the number of channels across different systems and applications. This heterogeneity complicates the design of a universal architecture capable of effectively processing such diverse data while maintaining robust feature extraction and learning capabilities. In this paper, we introduce UniFault, a foundation model for fault diagnosis that systematically addresses these issues. Specifically, the model incorporates a comprehensive data harmonization pipeline featuring two key innovations. First, a unification scheme transforms multivariate inputs into standardized univariate sequences. Second, a novel cross-domain temporal fusion strategy mitigates distribution shifts and enriches sample diversity and count, improving the model generalization across varying conditions. UniFault is pretrained on over 6.9 million samples spanning diverse FD datasets, enabling superior few-shot performance. Extensive experiments on real-world FD datasets demonstrate that UniFault achieves state-of-the-art performance, setting a new benchmark for fault diagnosis models and paving the way for more scalable and robust predictive maintenance solutions.

cs.LG

Learning Pattern-Specific Experts for Time Series Forecasting Under Patch-level Distribution Shift

Time series forecasting, which aims to predict future values based on historical data, has garnered significant attention due to its broad range of applications. However, real-world time series often exhibit complex non-uniform distribution with varying patterns across segments, such as season, operating condition, or semantic meaning, making accurate forecasting challenging. Existing approaches, which typically train a single model to capture all these diverse patterns, often struggle with the pattern drifts between patches and may lead to poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose TFPS, a novel architecture that leverages pattern-specific experts for more accurate and adaptable time series forecasting. TFPS employs a dual-domain encoder to capture both time-domain and frequency-domain features, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of temporal dynamics. It then uses subspace clustering to dynamically identify distinct patterns across data patches. Finally, pattern-specific experts model these unique patterns, delivering tailored predictions for each patch. By explicitly learning and adapting to evolving patterns, TFPS achieves significantly improved forecasting accuracy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TFPS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in long-term forecasting, through its dynamic and pattern-aware learning approach. The data and codes are available: https://github.com/syrGitHub/TFPS.

cs.LG

Learning Soft Sparse Shapes for Efficient Time-Series Classification

Shapelets are discriminative subsequences (or shapes) with high interpretability in time series classification. Due to the time-intensive nature of shapelet discovery, existing shapelet-based methods mainly focus on selecting discriminative shapes while discarding others to achieve candidate subsequence sparsification. However, this approach may exclude beneficial shapes and overlook the varying contributions of shapelets to classification performance. To this end, we propose a Soft sparse Shapes (SoftShape) model for efficient time series classification. Our approach mainly introduces soft shape sparsification and soft shape learning blocks. The former transforms shapes into soft representations based on classification contribution scores, merging lower-scored ones into a single shape to retain and differentiate all subsequence information. The latter facilitates intra- and inter-shape temporal pattern learning, improving model efficiency by using sparsified soft shapes as inputs. Specifically, we employ a learnable router to activate a subset of class-specific expert networks for intra-shape pattern learning. Meanwhile, a shared expert network learns inter-shape patterns by converting sparsified shapes into sequences. Extensive experiments show that SoftShape outperforms state-of-the-art methods and produces interpretable results.

cs.LG

Physics-Informed Neural Networks in Electromagnetic and Nanophotonic Design

The fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) with physics-guided frameworks has opened transformative avenues for advancing the design and optimization of electromagnetic and nanophotonic systems. Innovations in deep neural networks (DNNs) and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) now provide robust tools to tackle longstanding challenges in light scattering engineering, meta-optics, and nonlinear photonics. This review outlines recent progress in leveraging these computational methodologies to enhance device performance across domains such as dynamic light modulation, antenna design, and nonlinear optical phenomena. We systematically survey advancements in AI-driven forward and inverse design strategies, which bypass conventional trial-and-error approaches by embedding physical laws directly into optimization workflows. Furthermore, the integration of AI accelerates electromagnetic simulations and enables precise modelling of complex optical effects, including topological photonic states and nonlinear interactions. A comparative evaluation of algorithmic frameworks highlights their strengths in balancing computational efficiency, multi-objective optimization, and fabrication feasibility. Challenges such as limited interpretability of AI models and data scarcity for unconventional optical modes are critically addressed. Finally, we emphasize future opportunities in scalable multi-physics modelling, adaptive architectures, and practical deployment of AI-optimized photonic devices. This work underscores the pivotal role of AI in transcending traditional design limitations, thereby propelling the development of next-generation photonic technologies with unprecedented functionality and efficiency.

physics.optics

Bridging Distribution Gaps in Time Series Foundation Model Pretraining with Prototype-Guided Normalization

Foundation models have achieved remarkable success across diverse machine-learning domains through large-scale pretraining on large, diverse datasets. However, pretraining on such datasets introduces significant challenges due to substantial mismatches in data distributions, a problem particularly pronounced with time series data. In this paper, we tackle this issue by proposing a domain-aware adaptive normalization strategy within the Transformer architecture. Specifically, we replace the traditional LayerNorm with a prototype-guided dynamic normalization mechanism (ProtoNorm), where learned prototypes encapsulate distinct data distributions, and sample-to-prototype affinity determines the appropriate normalization layer. This mechanism effectively captures the heterogeneity of time series characteristics, aligning pretrained representations with downstream tasks. Through comprehensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms conventional pretraining techniques across both classification and forecasting tasks, while effectively mitigating the adverse effects of distribution shifts during pretraining. Incorporating ProtoNorm is as simple as replacing a single line of code. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world time series benchmarks validate the robustness and generalizability of our approach, advancing the development of more versatile time series foundation models.

cs.LG

Time Series Domain Adaptation via Latent Invariant Causal Mechanism

Time series domain adaptation aims to transfer the complex temporal dependence from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Recent advances leverage the stable causal mechanism over observed variables to model the domain-invariant temporal dependence. However, modeling precise causal structures in high-dimensional data, such as videos, remains challenging. Additionally, direct causal edges may not exist among observed variables (e.g., pixels). These limitations hinder the applicability of existing approaches to real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we find that the high-dimension time series data are generated from the low-dimension latent variables, which motivates us to model the causal mechanisms of the temporal latent process. Based on this intuition, we propose a latent causal mechanism identification framework that guarantees the uniqueness of the reconstructed latent causal structures. Specifically, we first identify latent variables by utilizing sufficient changes in historical information. Moreover, by enforcing the sparsity of the relationships of latent variables, we can achieve identifiable latent causal structures. Built on the theoretical results, we develop the Latent Causality Alignment (LCA) model that leverages variational inference, which incorporates an intra-domain latent sparsity constraint for latent structure reconstruction and an inter-domain latent sparsity constraint for domain-invariant structure reconstruction. Experiment results on eight benchmarks show a general improvement in the domain-adaptive time series classification and forecasting tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in real-world scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/DMIRLAB-Group/LCA.

cs.LG

Hierarchical Classification Auxiliary Network for Time Series Forecasting

Deep learning has significantly advanced time series forecasting through its powerful capacity to capture sequence relationships. However, training these models with the Mean Square Error (MSE) loss often results in over-smooth predictions, making it challenging to handle the complexity and learn high-entropy features from time series data with high variability and unpredictability. In this work, we introduce a novel approach by tokenizing time series values to train forecasting models via cross-entropy loss, while considering the continuous nature of time series data. Specifically, we propose a Hierarchical Classification Auxiliary Network, HCAN, a general model-agnostic component that can be integrated with any forecasting model. HCAN is based on a Hierarchy-Aware Attention module that integrates multi-granularity high-entropy features at different hierarchy levels. At each level, we assign a class label for timesteps to train an Uncertainty-Aware Classifier. This classifier mitigates the over-confidence in softmax loss via evidence theory. We also implement a Hierarchical Consistency Loss to maintain prediction consistency across hierarchy levels. Extensive experiments integrating HCAN with state-of-the-art forecasting models demonstrate substantial improvements over baselines on several real-world datasets.

cs.LG

Label-efficient Time Series Representation Learning: A Review

Label-efficient time series representation learning, which aims to learn effective representations with limited labeled data, is crucial for deploying deep learning models in real-world applications. To address the scarcity of labeled time series data, various strategies, e.g., transfer learning, self-supervised learning, and semi-supervised learning, have been developed. In this survey, we introduce a novel taxonomy for the first time, categorizing existing approaches as in-domain or cross-domain, based on their reliance on external data sources or not. Furthermore, we present a review of the recent advances in each strategy, conclude the limitations of current methodologies, and suggest future research directions that promise further improvements in the field.

cs.LG

Evidentially Calibrated Source-Free Time-Series Domain Adaptation with Temporal Imputation

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a model pre-trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain without access to source data, preserving the source domain's privacy. While SFDA is prevalent in computer vision, it remains largely unexplored in time series analysis. Existing SFDA methods, designed for visual data, struggle to capture the inherent temporal dynamics of time series, hindering adaptation performance. This paper proposes MAsk And imPUte (MAPU), a novel and effective approach for time series SFDA. MAPU addresses the critical challenge of temporal consistency by introducing a novel temporal imputation task. This task involves randomly masking time series signals and leveraging a dedicated temporal imputer to recover the original signal within the learned embedding space, bypassing the complexities of noisy raw data. Notably, MAPU is the first method to explicitly address temporal consistency in the context of time series SFDA. Additionally, it offers seamless integration with existing SFDA methods, providing greater flexibility. We further introduce E-MAPU, which incorporates evidential uncertainty estimation to address the overconfidence issue inherent in softmax predictions. To achieve that, we leverage evidential deep learning to obtain a better-calibrated pre-trained model and adapt the target encoder to map out-of-support target samples to a new feature representation closer to the source domain's support. This fosters better alignment, ultimately enhancing adaptation performance. Extensive experiments on five real-world time series datasets demonstrate that both MAPU and E-MAPU achieve significant performance gains compared to existing methods. These results highlight the effectiveness of our proposed approaches for tackling various time series domain adaptation problems.

cs.LG

TSLANet: Rethinking Transformers for Time Series Representation Learning

Time series data, characterized by its intrinsic long and short-range dependencies, poses a unique challenge across analytical applications. While Transformer-based models excel at capturing long-range dependencies, they face limitations in noise sensitivity, computational efficiency, and overfitting with smaller datasets. In response, we introduce a novel Time Series Lightweight Adaptive Network (TSLANet), as a universal convolutional model for diverse time series tasks. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive Spectral Block, harnessing Fourier analysis to enhance feature representation and to capture both long-term and short-term interactions while mitigating noise via adaptive thresholding. Additionally, we introduce an Interactive Convolution Block and leverage self-supervised learning to refine the capacity of TSLANet for decoding complex temporal patterns and improve its robustness on different datasets. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TSLANet outperforms state-of-the-art models in various tasks spanning classification, forecasting, and anomaly detection, showcasing its resilience and adaptability across a spectrum of noise levels and data sizes. The code is available at https://github.com/emadeldeen24/TSLANet.

cs.LG

Self-supervised Contrastive Representation Learning for Semi-supervised Time-Series Classification

Learning time-series representations when only unlabeled data or few labeled samples are available can be a challenging task. Recently, contrastive self-supervised learning has shown great improvement in extracting useful representations from unlabeled data via contrasting different augmented views of data. In this work, we propose a novel Time-Series representation learning framework via Temporal and Contextual Contrasting (TS-TCC) that learns representations from unlabeled data with contrastive learning. Specifically, we propose time-series-specific weak and strong augmentations and use their views to learn robust temporal relations in the proposed temporal contrasting module, besides learning discriminative representations by our proposed contextual contrasting module. Additionally, we conduct a systematic study of time-series data augmentation selection, which is a key part of contrastive learning. We also extend TS-TCC to the semi-supervised learning settings and propose a Class-Aware TS-TCC (CA-TCC) that benefits from the available few labeled data to further improve representations learned by TS-TCC. Specifically, we leverage the robust pseudo labels produced by TS-TCC to realize a class-aware contrastive loss. Extensive experiments show that the linear evaluation of the features learned by our proposed framework performs comparably with the fully supervised training. Additionally, our framework shows high efficiency in the few labeled data and transfer learning scenarios. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/emadeldeen24/CA-TCC}.

cs.LG

Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Time-Series via Temporal Mixup

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) has emerged as a powerful solution for the domain shift problem via transferring the knowledge from a labeled source domain to a shifted unlabeled target domain. Despite the prevalence of UDA for visual applications, it remains relatively less explored for time-series applications. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight contrastive domain adaptation framework called CoTMix for time-series data. Unlike existing approaches that either use statistical distances or adversarial techniques, we leverage contrastive learning solely to mitigate the distribution shift across the different domains. Specifically, we propose a novel temporal mixup strategy to generate two intermediate augmented views for the source and target domains. Subsequently, we leverage contrastive learning to maximize the similarity between each domain and its corresponding augmented view. The generated views consider the temporal dynamics of time-series data during the adaptation process while inheriting the semantics among the two domains. Hence, we gradually push both domains towards a common intermediate space, mitigating the distribution shift across them. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world time-series datasets show that our approach can significantly outperform all state-of-the-art UDA methods. The implementation code of CoTMix is available at \href{https://github.com/emadeldeen24/CoTMix}{github.com/emadeldeen24/CoTMix}.

cs.LG

Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Temporal Imputation for Time Series Data

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a pretrained model from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain without access to the source domain data, preserving source domain privacy. Despite its prevalence in visual applications, SFDA is largely unexplored in time series applications. The existing SFDA methods that are mainly designed for visual applications may fail to handle the temporal dynamics in time series, leading to impaired adaptation performance. To address this challenge, this paper presents a simple yet effective approach for source-free domain adaptation on time series data, namely MAsk and imPUte (MAPU). First, to capture temporal information of the source domain, our method performs random masking on the time series signals while leveraging a novel temporal imputer to recover the original signal from a masked version in the embedding space. Second, in the adaptation step, the imputer network is leveraged to guide the target model to produce target features that are temporally consistent with the source features. To this end, our MAPU can explicitly account for temporal dependency during the adaptation while avoiding the imputation in the noisy input space. Our method is the first to handle temporal consistency in SFDA for time series data and can be seamlessly equipped with other existing SFDA methods. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world time series datasets demonstrate that our MAPU achieves significant performance gain over existing methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/mohamedr002/MAPU_SFDA_TS}.

eess.SP