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Can LLMs Serve As Time Series Anomaly Detectors?

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arxiv 2408.03475 v1 pith:FMBQ4P35 submitted 2024-08-06 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords seriestimellmsanomaliesanomalydatasetdetectdetection
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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An emerging topic in large language models (LLMs) is their application to time series forecasting, characterizing mainstream and patternable characteristics of time series. A relevant but rarely explored and more challenging question is whether LLMs can detect and explain time series anomalies, a critical task across various real-world applications. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of LLMs, specifically GPT-4 and LLaMA3, in detecting and explaining anomalies in time series. Our studies reveal that: 1) LLMs cannot be directly used for time series anomaly detection. 2) By designing prompt strategies such as in-context learning and chain-of-thought prompting, GPT-4 can detect time series anomalies with results competitive to baseline methods. 3) We propose a synthesized dataset to automatically generate time series anomalies with corresponding explanations. By applying instruction fine-tuning on this dataset, LLaMA3 demonstrates improved performance in time series anomaly detection tasks. In summary, our exploration shows the promising potential of LLMs as time series anomaly detectors.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. VAN-AD: Visual Masked Autoencoder with Normalizing Flow For Time Series Anomaly Detection

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    VAN-AD adapts a pretrained visual MAE with distribution mapping and normalizing flow modules to detect anomalies in time series data more effectively across different datasets.

  2. AnomaMind: Agentic Time Series Anomaly Detection with Tool-Augmented Reasoning

    cs.LG 2026-02 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    An agentic framework combining vision-based localization, tool-based evidence checking, and RL-trained final detection reports higher F1 than ten baselines on four benchmarks, under an unfair and possibly circular evaluation.

  3. Text-ADBench: Text Anomaly Detection Benchmark based on LLMs Embedding

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLM embeddings improve text anomaly detection, shallow detectors match deep ones only under oracle embedding selection, and AUROC matrices are low-rank enough to support fast model evaluation.

  4. Towards Time Series Generation Conditioned on Unstructured Natural Language

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A diffusion model with BERT language conditioning can generate simple 100-step time series from natural language prompts, supported by a new 63,010-pair dataset.

  5. A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models

    cs.AI 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    The authors organize LLM-based time series reasoning into three exclusive topologies (direct, chain, branch) crossed with four objectives, and use them to label 125 papers, benchmarks, and resources.

  6. BALM-TSF: Balanced Multimodal Alignment for LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting

    cs.AI 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    BALM-TSF combines a statistical-prompt text branch with a patch-based time series branch, using scaling plus contrastive alignment to balance the two modalities, improving long-term and few-shot forecasting on five of...

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