This paper presents a new perspective on time series forecasting. In existing time series forecasting methods, the models take a sequence of numerical values as input and yield numerical values as output. The existing SOTA models are largely based on the Transformer architecture, modified with multiple encoding mechanisms to incorporate the context and semantics around the historical data. Inspired by the successes of pre-trained language foundation models, we pose a question about whether these models can also be adapted to solve time-series forecasting. Thus, we propose a new forecasting paradigm: prompt-based time series forecasting (PromptCast). In this novel task, the numerical input and output are transformed into prompts and the forecasting task is framed in a sentence-to-sentence manner, making it possible to directly apply language models for forecasting purposes. To support and facilitate the research of this task, we also present a large-scale dataset (PISA) that includes three real-world forecasting scenarios. We evaluate different SOTA numerical-based forecasting methods and language generation models. The benchmark results with various forecasting settings demonstrate the proposed PromptCast with language generation models is a promising research direction. Additionally, in comparison to conventional numerical-based forecasting, PromptCast shows a much better generalization ability under the zero-shot setting.

The next Point of Interest (POI) recommendation task is to predict users' immediate next POI visit given their historical data. Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) data, which is often used for the next POI recommendation task, comes with challenges. One frequently disregarded challenge is how to effectively use the abundant contextual information present in LBSN data. Previous methods are limited by their numerical nature and fail to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle this challenge. Our framework allows us to preserve heterogeneous LBSN data in its original format, hence avoiding the loss of contextual information. Furthermore, our framework is capable of comprehending the inherent meaning of contextual information due to the inclusion of commonsense knowledge. In experiments, we test our framework on three real-world LBSN datasets. Our results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models in all three datasets. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework in using contextual information as well as alleviating the commonly encountered cold-start and short trajectory problems.

Pedestrian path prediction is a very challenging problem because scenes are often crowded or contain obstacles. Existing state-of-the-art long short-term memory (LSTM)-based prediction methods have been mainly focused on analyzing the influence of other people in the neighborhood of each pedestrian while neglecting the role of potential destinations in determining a walking path. In this article, we propose classifying pedestrian trajectories into a number of route classes (RCs) and using them to describe the pedestrian movement patterns. Based on the RCs obtained from trajectory clustering, our algorithm, which we name the prediction of pedestrian paths by LSTM (PoPPL), predicts the destination regions through a bidirectional LSTM classification network in the first stage and then generates trajectories corresponding to the predicted destination regions through one of the three proposed LSTM-based architectures in the second stage. Our algorithm also outputs probabilities of multiple predicted trajectories that head toward the destination regions. We have evaluated PoPPL: against other state-of-the-art methods on two public data sets. The results show that our algorithm outperforms other methods and incorporating potential destination prediction improves the trajectory prediction accuracy.

Zechen Li, Shohreh Deldari, Linyao Chen, Hao Xue, Flora D. Salim. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is fundamental to a wide range of scientific research work and industrial applications. Most of the current advanced trajectory prediction methods incorporate context information such as pedestrian neighbourhood, labelled static obstacles, and the background scene into the trajectory prediction process. In contrast to these methods which require rich contexts, the method in our paper focuses on predicting a pedestrian’s future trajectory using his/her observed part of the trajectory only. Our method, which we refer to as LVTA, is a Location-Velocity-Temporal Attention LSTM model where two temporal attention mechanisms are applied to the hidden state vectors from the location and velocity LSTM layers. In addition, a location-velocity attention layer embedded inside a tweak module is used to improve the predicted location and velocity coordinates before they are passed to the next time step. Extensive experiments conducted on three large benchmark datasets and comparison with eleven existing trajectory prediction methods demonstrate that LVTA achieves competitive prediction performance. Specifically, LVTA attains 9.19 pixels Average Displacement Error (ADE) and 17.28 pixels Final Displacement Error (FDE) for the Central Station dataset, and 0.46 metres ADE and 0.92 metres FDE for the ETH&UCY datasets. Furthermore, evaluation on using LVTA to generate trajectories of different prediction lengths and on new scenes without the need of retraining confirms that it has good generalizability.

Energy load forecasting plays a crucial role in optimizing resource allocation and managing energy consumption in buildings and cities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages language models for energy load forecasting. We employ prompting techniques to convert energy consumption data into descriptive sentences, enabling fine-tuning of language models. By adopting an autoregressive generating approach, our proposed method enables predictions of various horizons of future energy load consumption. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed method. Our results indicate that utilizing language models for energy load forecasting holds promise for enhancing energy efficiency and facilitating intelligent decision-making in energy systems.