cs.AIAug 24, 2026

In-Context Inpainting for Time Series Forecasting

Authors: Thang Nguyen, Dung Nguyen, Romero Morais, Truyen Tran

Organizations: Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria 3216, Australia

Abstract

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.

Explore similar work

CardsList