TimeSage-EV: A Live Benchmark for Agentic Time Series Analysis in Evolving Environments
Organizations: Eindhoven University of Technology · University of Oxford · VulpiVox Intelligence · Squirrel Ai Learning ·
Abstract
Time series analysis in high-stakes domains relies on recurring data releases, where new observations can alter the evidence base and the validity of later conclusions. Existing time series QA benchmarks mostly rely on fixed snapshots, leaving temporal validity and cutoff-aware evidence use unevaluated. We introduce TimeSage-EV, a live benchmark for agentic time series analysis in evolving environments. It tracks 60 real institutional scenarios across 6 domains, comprising 1,485 scenario-period QA pairs from Feb 2023 to May 2026 and spanning monthly, weekly, daily, and irregular release cadences. At each period, large language model (LLM) agents receive time series data and source reports, while the withheld target release provides ground truth. TimeSage-EV evaluates state identification, data summarization, and outlook reasoning. Experiments with frontier LLM agents and TimeSage-1.0, a novel self-evolving agent with a reusable analytical skill library, reveal significant performance gaps across model tiers and recurring failures in temporal validity, exogenous context use, and adaptation. We release TimeSage-EV as a research resource with monthly updates, code, a leaderboard, and failure-mode analyses.
Figures & tables
| Benchmark | TS | Text | Agent | Live | Evol. | Cutoff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time-LLM Jin et al. (2024) | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| ChatTime Wang et al. (2025) | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| Time-MQA Kong et al. (2025) | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| TimeSeriesExam Cai et al. (2024) | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| WebArena Zhou et al. (2024) | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| LiveBench White et al. (2025) | ✘ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ |
| Model | State ID | Change Det. | Comp. ID | Event Det. | Attribution | Forecast |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sonnet-4.6 | ||||||
| GPT-5.4 | ||||||
| Kimi-K2.6 | ||||||
| Qwen-3.5-397B | ||||||
| Devstral-2-123B | ||||||
| Gemma-4-31B |
Appendix figures & tables17 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| No. | Validity check |
|---|---|
| 1 | Public access. Source is publicly accessible without credentials, payment, or approval. |
| 2 | Time series grounding. Task uses an observable timestamped series with values for the queried period. |
| 3 | Query persistence. The same template applies to both historical and future periods. |
| 4 | Temporal anchoring. The source provides a date, period, timestamp, or update window. |
| 5 | GT freshness. Ground truth updates at least monthly, except report-level hard tasks. |
| 6 | Temporal variability. Outputs vary over time and avoid near-constant majority labels. |
| Tier | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Easy | Source: a data dashboard reporting current operational state as categorical indicators. Task: identify the current state (reasoning LOW, capability dependence LOW). Format: a single categorical label. Eval: exact match against the correct option. |
| Medium | Source: a data brief with time series and descriptive commentary, but no causal analysis. Task: summarize recent changes across time points and sub-components (reasoning MEDIUM, dependence MEDIUM). Format: a structured schema (period value, direction, leading sub-component, short summary). Eval: LLM judge or keyword matching for per-field coverage and factual consistency. |
| Hard | Source: an analytical report with trend judgements, drivers, risks, and outlooks. Task: reason about causes of change and what comes next (reasoning HIGH, dependence HIGH). Format: a structured schema (conclusion, key drivers, risks, uncertainties, evidence). Eval: LLM judge or keyword matching, with each claim traceable to a section, table, or figure. |
| No. | Validity check |
|---|---|
| 1 | Period alignment. The time series value, source release, and question instance refer to the same timestamp, date, period, or update window. |
| 2 | Minimum history. The source supports at least periods for backtesting and future live evaluation. |
| 3 | Reference traceability. Time series analyses in released reports are traceable to concrete public evidence, such as a field, label, value, table, figure, or report statement. |
| 4 | Information isolation. The evidence package for period uses only information available at or before the query time, excluding future releases, later revisions, and retrospective explanations. |
| 5 | Objective evaluability. Time series analyses in released reports can be derived by predefined rules and evaluated without relying on subjective preference. |
| ID | Question intent |
|---|---|
| A — State identification | |
| A1 | The current categorical state of the target. |
| A2 | The latest reported value. |
| A3 | The direction of the latest reading (up / down / flat). |
| B — Change detection | |
| B1 | The change from the previous period. |
| Scoring rule | Question types |
|---|---|
| Atomic rules | |
| Label match | A1, A3, B2, B6, C2, D2, E1, E2, E5, F2 |
| Numeric check | A2, B1, B3, B4, B5, B7 |
| Set overlap | C1, C4, D1, D2, E3, E5 |
| LLM judgment | E1, period summary |
| Composition rules | |
| Gate | Grounding-audit check |
|---|---|
| 1 | Schema conformance. Ground truth validates against the answer schema; its top-level keys equal the required set, and enum values stay within the declared options. |
| 2 | File completeness. Each instance carries its question, ground truth, evidence, time series, and schema files. |
| 3 | Question–artifact consistency. Columns, files, and period labels named in the question exist and match the data; output-example keys and enum options equal the schema. |
| 4 | Rule reproducibility. The deterministic derivation rule recomputes the stored ground truth (report-grounded fields exempt). |
| 5 | Time series health. The cumulative table is strictly ascending in time. |
| 6 | Evidence–data consistency. Numeric and key–value references in the evidence resolve to table cells, and ground-truth enum strings appear in the evidence. |
| No. | Artifact quality check |
|---|---|
| 1 | Time series completeness. Core columns are populated, the date axis is continuous, and there are at least 24 rows (cf. Step 4). |
| 2 | Column hygiene. No duplicate date parts, rescaled duplicates, constant columns, embedded narrative, or agent-derivable columns. |
| 3 | GT leakage. No column’s latest value, value set, or sign restates the ground-truth answer (Easy categorical state exempted). |
| 4 | Difficulty–task alignment. Easy reads a latest-row state; Medium summarises across time from a brief; Hard reasons causally from a report, with no analytical conclusions baked into the table. |
| 5 | Question non-hallucination. Referenced fields and windows exist; the question recurs across at least three periods and instantiates over all periods; difficulty matches the tier. |
| 6 | Schema–template consistency. Tier and domain match the directory, Easy options equal the schema enum, and declared columns equal the table header. |
| T | Scenario | Cad. | Source |
| Agriculture | |||
| e | usda_cattle | mon. | esmis.nal.usda.gov |
| e | usda_chicken | mon. | esmis.nal.usda.gov |
| e | usda_cold_storage_butter | mon. | esmis.nal.usda.gov |
| e | usda_cold_storage_pork | mon. | esmis.nal.usda.gov |
| m | usda_crop | wkly. | esmis.nal.usda.gov |
| Rule | Match score |
|---|---|
| Label match | if , else . |
| Boolean match | if , else . |
| Text match | if stripped strings are equal, else . |
| Numeric check | if , or when relative tolerance is set and ; else . With no tolerance, exact equality is required. |
| Set overlap | Dice/F1 overlap ; two empty sets score , and a single empty set scores . |
| Model | Tier | Accuracy | Coverage | Faithfulness | Quality | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5.4 | Overall | 84.89 | 77.30 | 91.20 | 90.58 | 85.99 |
| Easy | 98.54 | 98.67 | 96.12 | 93.04 | 96.59 | |
| Medium | 93.44 | 76.79 | 96.64 | 87.28 | 88.54 | |
| Hard | 62.09 | 56.58 | 80.44 | 91.69 | 72.70 | |
| Qwen-3.5-397B | Overall | 84.72 | 75.57 | 88.66 | 87.99 | 84.24 |
| Easy | 98.61 | 99.86 | 92.50 | 97.61 | 97.14 |
| Evaluation Axis | Agreement Rate | Cohen’s |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | 94.5% | 0.882 |
| Faithfulness | 98.4% | 0.917 |
| Quality | 76.0% | 0.665 |
Time Series QA
Time-series question answering connects natural-language questions to evidence and reasoning over sequential data.
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