We propose ICI-Time, a novel framework that reframes time series forecasting as a visual inpainting task, leveraging the generalisation power of large vision models (LVMs). Unlike methods that require specialised temporal architectures and extensive domain-specific training, ICI-Time transforms time series into structured visual representations (area charts) and applies visual in-context learning, reformulating forecasting as pattern completion within a grid-structured prompt that pre-trained vision transformers can solve without fine-tuning or architectural modification. Temporal dependencies are represented through spatial layout, with a consistent, invertible mapping between numerical and visual domains. Extensive experiments across epidemiology, meteorology, and power systems demonstrate that ICI-Time performs competitively against deep learning baselines and shows promising adaptability under limited-data settings, introducing a new paradigm that bridges temporal and visual domains.
Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models. Yet, current approaches primarily focus on forecasting, while real-world time series are often irregularly and partially observed, requiring models that can jointly forecast, impute missing values, and handle degraded sampling conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce TS-ICL, a novel probabilistic In-Context Learning encoder--regressor Transformer that unifies forecasting and imputation. TS-ICL formulates time series tasks as timestamp-aligned regression and naturally incorporates covariates by training on synthetic dependency structures generated from a novel causal data prior. Empirically, TS-ICL achieves a new state-of-the-art in imputation, while remaining competitive with leading forecasting foundation models across both univariate and covariate-aware benchmarks. It shows particularly strong performance in forecasting with partially observed look-back windows.
Time series forecasting models operate on raw numerical sequences, lacking the semantic knowledge that domain experts implicitly leverage, such as the physical meaning of each variable, its statistical behavior, and its temporal dynamics. Recent efforts to bridge this gap fall into two camps. Some rely on large language models at inference time, which is computationally expensive. Others apply uniform textual prompts at the dataset level, ignoring the heterogeneous semantics across individual variates. We propose SAGE (Seeing and Augmenting with Grounded Encoding), an end-to-end CLIP-based framework that jointly models temporal, cross-variable, textual, and visual information. The CLIP text encoder processes frequency-enhanced patches and variable tokens, while gated residual paths inject variable-specific descriptions and statistical descriptors. In parallel, the frozen CLIP vision encoder aligns rendered series with temporal representations through a training-only contrastive objective. This dual use of CLIP adds complementary semantic and visual supervision without placing an LLM in the forecasting loop. Across eight long-term benchmarks and M4, SAGE achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Ablations confirm complementary gains from multimodal alignment and variable-level knowledge.
In-context learning (ICL) enables task adaptation at inference time by conditioning on demonstrations rather than updating model parameters. Although recent time-series foundation models incorporate contextual conditioning, retrieval, or example-based prompting, they typically rely on implicit positional structure or task-specific objectives rather than explicit instruction-conditioned input-output demonstrations. We introduce iAmTime, a time-series foundation model trained with instruction-conditioned amortized meta-learning to infer tasks directly from example demonstrations. iAmTime represents each episode as a structured prompt over historical context and future-known variables using specialized semantic tokens that attend to designated time-series regions, exchange information across demonstrations, and inject task information into the query representation. The model combines a Hierarchical Multi-Scope Transformer Encoder, which captures temporal and covariate dynamics while inferring latent task structure from demonstrated input-output mappings, with a Task-Conditioned Patch Decoder, which adapts decoding through expert-based routing. We train iAmTime on large-scale real and synthetic corpora using supervised and self-supervised instruction-conditioned tasks, including forecasting, imputation, reconstruction, classification, anomaly detection, and source de-mixing. Across diverse domains, frequencies, and horizons, iAmTime improves zero-shot adaptation over strong time-series foundation baselines on probabilistic and point forecasting benchmarks, while achieving competitive or superior performance on four non-forecasting tasks.