Taming Pre-trained LLMs for Generalised Time Series Forecasting via Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation

Multivariate time series forecasting has recently gained great success with the rapid growth of deep learning models. However, existing approaches usually train models from scratch using limited temporal data, preventing their generalization. Recently, with the surge of the Large Language Models (LLMs), several works have attempted to introduce LLMs into time series forecasting. Despite promising results, these methods directly take time series as the input to LLMs, ignoring the inherent modality gap between temporal and text data. In this work, we propose a novel Large Language Models and time series alignment framework, dubbed LLaTA, to fully unleash the potentials of LLMs in the time series forecasting challenge. Based on cross-modal knowledge distillation, the proposed method exploits both input-agnostic static knowledge and input-dependent dynamic knowledge in pre-trained LLMs. In this way, it empowers the forecasting model with favorable performance as well as strong generalization abilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed method establishes a new state of the art for both long- and short-term forecasting. Code is available at https: //github. com/Hank0626/LLaTA.