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We are developing an advanced multi-modal forecasting system that utilizes both time series data and textual data, such as news articles, to predict future trends and events. This innovative system integrates advanced time series backbone models with large language models (LLMs), combining the strengths of statistical analysis and machine learning techniques.
The time series model analyzes historical numerical data to identify patterns, while the LLM processes and extracts insights from text data, providing a richer contextual understanding for the predictions. This integrated approach aims to enhance decision-making processes by delivering not only accurate forecasts, but also insightful explanations based on relevant textual information.
By correlating numerical trends with contextual data, our system offers a comprehensive understanding of the factors driving the predictions, thereby enabling more informed and strategic decisions.
Team Members: Haifeng Chen
Publication Tags: time series, llm, large language models
Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated content after being employed. Efficient and accurate knowledge up-dates without costly retraining are a major challenge. This problem is particularly challenging in lifelong settings, where complex, unstructured knowledge must coexist without
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally sensitive real-world tasks. However, existing cultural alignment ap-roaches fail to align LLMs broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-culture interference. We propose CultureManager,
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing by encoding extensive knowledge, but their utility relies on timely updates as human knowledge keeps evolving. In this paper, we investigate the problem of LLM knowledge updates, which requires simultaneously
We study the problem of subgroup discovery for survival analysis, where the goal is to find an interpretable subset of the data on which a Cox model is highly accurate. We examine why existing quality functions are insufficient for this problem and introduce two technical innovations: the expected prediction
NEC Laboratories America heads to ACL 2026 in San Diego, California, July 2–7, to present accepted papers spanning knowledge updating and memory control in large language models, task-aware cultural alignment, uncertainty-aware reasoning, and adaptive chain-of-thought optimization, representing some
Satellite imagery is vast, high-resolution, and rich with information, but finding specific objects within it using natural language has remained a stubborn challenge. Open-SAT, developed by researchers at NEC Laboratories America and North South University, tackles this problem without retraining any
NEC Labs America headed to Denver for CVPR 2026, one of the most prestigious gatherings in computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition. The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition brought innovators from around the world to share breakthroughs.
In satellite applications, user queries often take the form of open-ended natural language, extending beyond a fixed set of predefined categories. This open-vocabulary nature poses significant challenges for retrieving relevant image tiles, as the retrieval system must generalize to a wide range of unseen
Most retrieval-augmented generation systems stop at documents, ignoring the relational databases that power finance, healthcare, and research. Our researchers built a rule-driven framework that learns which source to query for each question, delivering better answers at lower computational cost.
Deploying microservices across the computing continuum (edgecloud) requires placement decisions that adapt to workload variation and heterogeneous infrastructure, yet existing solutions often rely on static policies or opaque heuristics. We present Bellona a system for reliable and auditable Large
Time series data is ubiquitous across various domains, including manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. High-quality annotations are essential for effectively understanding time series and facilitating downstream tasks. However, obtaining such annotations is challenging, particularly in mission-critical
NEC Laboratories America celebrates Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day by recognizing the women researchers, engineers, and interns whose work in artificial intelligence, optical networking, cybersecurity, and data science is helping shape the future of technology.
Time series analysis provides essential insights for real-world system dynamics and informs downstream decision-making, yet most existing methods often overlook the rich contextual signals present in auxiliary modalities. To bridge this gap, we introduce TimeXL, a multi-modal prediction framework that
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming the centerpiece in the design and deployment of Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. AI agents typically have (a) reasoning ability to analyze and think through the given task, (b) context/memory to remember things in the short-term and long-term, and
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become the de facto parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method for large language models (LLMs) by constraining weight updates to low-rank matrices. Recent works such as Tied-LoRA, VeRA, and VB-LoRA push efficiency further by introducing additional constraints to reduce
Creating effective slide presentations requires adapting both content and structure to match the communication context e.g. whether the presentation is for summarizing to executives, or reporting progress to research supervisors. In research and enterprise environments, this need for context-sensitive
Identifying subject-matter experts within organizations remains a challenging task due to the scale, heterogeneity, and unstructured nature of enterprise knowledge assets. We present TalentScout, an AI-driven expert identification system that constructs a unified, skill-centric knowledge graph by ingesting
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused
Anomaly detection is essential for identifying unusual system behaviors and has wide-ranging applications, from fraud detection to system monitoring. In web servers, anomalies are typically detected using two types of data: metrics (numerical indicators of performance) and logs (records of system events).
Large language models (LLMs) integrated into multi-step agent systems enable complex decision-making processes across various applications. However, their outputs often lack reliability, making uncertainty estimation crucial. Existing uncertainty estimation methods primarily focus on final-step outputs,
Causal discovery is an imperative foundation for decision-making across domains, such as smart health, AI for drug discovery and AIOps. Traditional statistical causal discovery methods, while well-established, predominantly rely on observational data and often overlook the semantic cues inherent in cause-and-effect
Enterprises are increasingly adopting Generative AI applications to extract insights from large volumes of multimodal documents in domains such as finance, law, healthcare, and industry. These documents contain structured and unstructured data (images, charts, handwritten texts, etc.) requiring robust
In this paper, we propose a novel agentic AI system called XPF, which enables users to create “agents” using just natural language, where each agent is capable of executing complex, real-world business workflows in an accurate and reliable manner. XPF provides an interface to develop and iterate over
Latency-critical applications demand quick responses. Ideally, detailed insights are preferable for the best decision making and response actions. However, in situations when detailed insights cannot be provided quickly, even basic information goes a long way in tackling the situation effectively. For
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potential artificial generic intelligence recently, however, their usage is costly with high response latency. Given mixed LLMs with their own strengths and weaknesses, LLM routing aims to identify the most suitable model for each query in the stream to maximize response
Recent research has developed a number of eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques, such as gradient-based approaches, input perturbation-base methods, and black-box explanation methods. While these XAI techniques can extract meaningful insights from deep learning models, how to properly evaluate them remains
Real-world time series data often require analysis or interpretation from domain experts. Some tasks, like time series question answering, involve both time series and natural language questions, posing challenges for single-modality language models to understand their interaction. To this end, we present
The advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), is reshaping the software industry by automating code generation. Many LLM-driven distributed processing systems rely on serial code generation constrained by predefined libraries, limiting flexibility
Marine litter detection is crucial for environmental monitoring, yet the imbalance in existing datasets limits model performance in identifying various types of waste accurately. This paper presents an efficient data augmentation pipeline that combines generative diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion)
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is widely used in many applications such as smart city, transportation, healthcare, and environment monitoring. A key task of IoT maintenance is to analyze the abnormal sensor records and generate incident report. Traditionally, domain experts engage in such labor intensive
Edge computing has emerged as a transformative technology that reduces application latency, improves cost efficiency, enhances security, and enables large-scale deployment of applications across various domains. In environmental monitoring, systems such as MegaSense[49], use low-cost sensors to gather
NEC Labs America is proud to attend NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver, Canada from December 10-15. Zachary Izzo will present Subgroup Discovery with the Cox Model, Shaobo Han will present VB-LoRA: Extreme Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning with Vector Banks and Jonathan Warrell will present Discrete-Continuous
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional capabilities in open generation across various domains, yet they encounter difficulties with tasks that require intensive knowledge. To address these challenges, methods for integrating knowledge have been developed, which augment LLMs with domain-specific
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs), have shown tremendous potential in automating several tasks and improving human productivity. Recent works have shown them to be quite useful in writing and summarizing text (articles, blogs, poems, stories, songs,
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems combine the strengths of language generation and information retrieval to power many real-world applications like chatbots. Use of RAG for understanding of videos is appealing but there are two critical limitations. One-time, upfront conversion of all content
Traffic cameras are essential in urban areas, playing a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems. Multiple cameras at intersections enhance law enforcement capabilities, traffic management, and pedestrian safety. However, efficiently managing and analyzing multi-camera feeds poses challenges
We propose an efficient routing strategy for AllReduce transfers, which compromise of the dominant traffic in machine learning-centric datacenters, to achieve fast parameter synchronization in distributed machine learning, improving the average training time by 9%.
Though Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable open-generation capabilities across diverse domains, they struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks. To alleviate this issue, knowledge integration methods have been proposed to enhance LLMs with domain-specific knowledge graphs using external modules.
Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem,
Our new project, Time Series Language Model for Explainable AI, represents a significant leap forward in the field of forecasting and explainable AI. By combining advanced forecasting techniques with explainable AI, we are paving the way for a future where data-driven insights are not only accurate but
The development of Agentic LLMs for AI Orchestration represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. By seamlessly integrating computer vision, logic, and compute modules, our LLM is poised to revolutionize the way complex workflows are managed and executed. Supported by robust research
This paper introduces the retrieval-augmented large language model with Definite Finite Automaton (DFA-RAG), a novel framework designed to enhance the capabilities of conversational agents using large language models (LLMs). Traditional LLMs face challenges in generating regulated and compliant responses
Costs of LLM API usage rise rapidly when proprietary enterprise data is used as context for user queries to generate more accurate responses from LLMs. To reduce costs, we propose LeanContext, which generates query-aware, compact and AI model-friendly summaries of relevant enterprise data context. This
In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revolutionized various fields by providing a few task-relevant demonstrations in the prompt. However, trustworthy issues with LLMs response, such as hallucination, have also been actively discussed. Existing
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across a wide array of NLP tasks. However, the escalation in model size also engenders substantial deployment costs. While few efforts have explored model pruning techniques to reduce the size of LLMs, they mainly center on general or
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is used in natural language processing (NLP) to provide query-relevant information in enterprise documents to large language models (LLMs). Such enterprise context enables the LLMs to generate more informed and accurate responses. When enterprise data is primarily
Autonomous vehicle (AV) systems rely on robust perception models as a cornerstone of safety assurance. However, objects encountered on the road exhibit a long-tailed distribution, with rare or unseen categories posing challenges to a deployed perception model. This necessitates an expensive process of
AI/ML techniques have been used to solve systems problems, but their applicability to customize solutions on-the-fly has been limited. Traditionally, any customization required manually changing the AI/ML model or modifying the code, configuration parameters, application settings, etc. This incurs too
Question-answering (QA) is a significant application of Large Language Models (LLMs), shaping chatbot capabilities across healthcare, education, and customer service. However, widespread LLM integration presents a challenge for small businesses due to the high expenses of LLM API usage. Costs rise rapidly
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are neural models that leverage the dependency structure in graphical data via message passing among the graph nodes. GNNs have emerged as pivotal architectures in analyzing graph-structured data, and their expansive application in sensitive domains requires a comprehensive
Open Information Extraction (OIE) task aims at extracting structured facts from unstructured text, typically in the form of (subject, relation, object) triples. Despite the potential of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as a general task solver, they lag behind state-of-the-art (supervised) methods
Modern techniques like contrastive learning have been effectively used in many areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, and graph-structured data. Creating positive examples that assist the model in learning robust and discriminative representations is a crucial stage in contrastive
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems combine the strengths of language generation and information retrieval to power many real-world applications like chatbots. Use of RAG for combined understanding of multimodal data such as text, images and videos is appealing but two critical limitations exist:
Self-consistency has emerged as a powerful method for improving the accuracy of short answers generated by large language models. As previously defined, it only concerns the accuracy of a final answer parsed from generated text. In this work, we extend the idea to open response generation, by integrating
Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem,
Although planning is a crucial component of the autonomous driving stack, researchers have yet to develop robust planning algorithms that are capable of safely handling the diverse range of possible driving scenarios. Learning-based planners suffer from overfitting and poor long-tail performance. On
Read AutoTCL: Automated Time Series Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentations publication. Modern techniques like contrastive learning have been effectively used in many areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, and graph-structured data. Creating positive examples that assist
Confidence and Dispersity Speak: Characterizing Prediction Matrix for Unsupervised Accuracy Estimation This work aims to assess how well a model performs under distribution shifts without using labels. While recent methods study prediction confidence, this work reports prediction dispersity is another
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond
With decreasing hardware costs and increasing demand for autonomic management, many of today’s physical systems are equipped with an extensive network of sensors, generating a considerable amount of time series data daily. A highly valuable source of information, time series data is used by businesses
Internet of things (IoT) applications deploy massive number of sensors to monitor the system and environment. Anomaly detection on streaming sensor data is an important task for IoT maintenance and operation. However, there are two major challenges for anomaly detection in real IoT applications: (1)
Promising progress has been made toward learning efficient time series representations in recent years, but the learned representations often lack interpretability and do not encode semantic meanings by the complex interactions of many latent factors. Learning representations that disentangle these latent
We experimentally demonstrated the real-time operation of a photonic neuron with a self-connection, a prerequisite for integrated recurrent neural networks (RNNs). After studying two applications, we propose a photonics-assisted platform for time series prediction and classification.
This work aims to assess how well a model performs under distribution shifts without using labels. While recent methods study prediction confidence, this work reports prediction dispersity is another informative cue. Confidence reflects whether the individual prediction is certain, dispersity indicates
In this paper, we propose an ordered time series classification framework that is robust against missing classes in the training data, i.e., during testing we can prescribe classes that are missing during training. This framework relies on two main components: (1) our newly proposed ordinal quadruplet
Prognostics or early detection of incipient faults by leveraging the monitoring time series data in complex systems is valuable to automatic system management and predictive maintenance. However, this task is challenging. First, learning the multi-dimensional heterogeneous time series data with various
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a representative primary liver cancer caused by long-term and repetitive liver injury. Surgical resection is generally selected as the radical cure treatment. Because the early recurrence of HCC after resection is associated with low overall survival, the prediction
Multivariate time series data are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in varies real-world applications such as smart city, power plant monitoring, wearable devices, etc. Given the current time series segment, how to retrieve similar segments within the historical data in an efficient and effective manner
The problem of learning and forecasting underlying trends in time series data arises in a variety of applications, such as traffic management, energy optimization, etc. In literature, a trend in time series is characterized by the slope and duration, and its prediction is then to forecast the two values
In this paper, we consider the problem of developing predictive models with limited data for energy assets such as electricity loads, PV power generations, etc. We specifically investigate the cases where the amount of historical data is not sufficient to effectively train the prediction model. We first
Accurate modeling of battery capacity degradation is an important component for both battery manufacturers and energy management systems. In this paper, we develop a battery degradation model using deep learning algorithms. The model is trained with the real data collected from battery storage solutions
Machine learning tasks typically involve minimizing a loss function that measures the distance of the model output and the ground-truth. In some applications, in addition to the usual loss function, the output must also satisfy certain requirements for further processing. We call such requirements model