Time-Prompt: Integrated Heterogeneous Prompts for Unlocking LLMs in Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting aims to model temporal dependencies among variables for future state inference, holding significant importance and widespread applications in real-world scenarios. Although deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable progress, they still exhibit suboptimal performance in long-term forecasting and data-scarce scenarios. Recent research demonstrates that large language models (LLMs) achieve promising performance in time series forecasting. However, we find existing LLM-based methods still have shortcomings: (1) the absence of a unified paradigm for textual prompt formulation and (2) the neglect of modality discrepancies between textual prompts and time series. To address this, we propose LLM-Prompt, an LLM-based time series forecasting framework integrating multi-prompt information and cross-modal semantic alignment. Specifically, we first construct a unified textual prompt paradigm containing learnable soft prompts and textualized hard prompts. Second, to enhance LLMs' comprehensive understanding of the forecasting task, we design a semantic space embedding and cross-modal alignment module to achieve cross-modal fusion of temporal and textual information. Finally, the transformed time series from the LLMs are projected to obtain the forecasts. Comprehensive evaluations on 6 public datasets and 3 carbon emission datasets demonstrate that LLM-Prompt is a powerful framework for time series forecasting.