ExoTimer: Leveraging Large Language Models for Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Variables

Lan Wu, Xuebin Wang, Chenglong Ge, Ruijuan Chu, Linyu Wang

Abstract: Real-world systems often exhibit complex behaviors and are influenced by various external factors, making the integration of exogenous variables essential for accurate and robust time series forecasting. However, modeling time series with exogenous variables remains challenging due to dynamic cross-variable dependencies and the semantic gap between numerical time series data and external contextual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful language understanding and knowledge representation capabilities in real-world systems, offering a promising solution to bridge this gap. Motivated by this, we propose ExoTimer, a framework that deeply integrates LLMs for time series modeling with exogenous variables. We begin by introducing an Exo-Aware Endogenous Encoder to dynamically incorporate important exogenous variable information and generate patch-level representations for endogenous variables. To leverage the rich knowledge in LLMs, a Multi-Attribute Prompt Embedding module is elaborately designed to convert heterogeneous temporal features, contextual information and task specifications into LLM-interpretable textual prompts. Additionally, we propose Bi-Hash Alignment, a lightweight cross-modal alignment mechanism that bridges textual and temporal modalities in a shared hash space. Finally, a Dual-Branch Predictor with a learnable coefficient is employed to obtain the final time series prediction by integrating temporal-text and text-temporal representations. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world datasets demonstrate that ExoTimer achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits generalizability and scalability in both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.