Visual Reasoning over Time Series via Multi-Agent System
About
Time series analysis underpins many real-world applications, yet existing time-series-specific methods and pretrained large-model-based approaches remain limited in integrating intuitive visual reasoning and generalizing across tasks with adaptive tool usage. To address these limitations, we propose MAS4TS, a tool-driven multi-agent system for general time series tasks, built upon an Analyzer-Reasoner-Executor paradigm that integrates agent communication, visual reasoning, and latent reconstruction within a unified framework. MAS4TS first performs visual reasoning over time series plots with structured priors using a Vision-Language Model to extract temporal structures, and subsequently reconstructs predictive trajectories in latent space. Three specialized agents coordinate via shared memory and gated communication, while a router selects task-specific tool chains for execution. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MAS4TS achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of time series tasks, while exhibiting strong generalization and efficient inference.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Long-term time-series forecasting | Weather | MSE0.232 | 348 | |
| Long-term time-series forecasting | ETTh2 | MSE0.379 | 327 | |
| Anomaly Detection | SMD | F1 Score85.1 | 217 | |
| Long-term forecasting | ETTm1 | MSE0.367 | 184 | |
| Long-term forecasting | ETTh1 | MSE0.44 | 179 | |
| Anomaly Detection | SWaT | F1 Score93.14 | 174 | |
| Long-term forecasting | ETTm2 | MSE0.278 | 174 | |
| Time Series Imputation | Weather | MAE0.07 | 120 | |
| Time Series Imputation | ETTm1 | MSE0.054 | 110 | |
| Time Series Imputation | ETTh1 | MSE0.129 | 86 |