SenTSR-Bench: Thinking with Injected Knowledge for Time-Series Reasoning

Zelin He, Boran Han, Xiyuan Zhang, Shuai Zhang, Haotian Lin, Qi Zhu, Haoyang Fang, Danielle C. Maddix, Abdul Fatir Ansari, Akash Chandrayan, Abhinav Pradhan, Bernie Wang, Matthew Reimherr · Feb 23, 2026 · Citations: 0

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Abstract

Time-series diagnostic reasoning is essential for many applications, yet existing solutions face a persistent gap: general reasoning large language models (GRLMs) possess strong reasoning skills but lack the domain-specific knowledge to understand complex time-series patterns. Conversely, fine-tuned time-series LLMs (TSLMs) understand these patterns but lack the capacity to generalize reasoning for more complicated questions. To bridge this gap, we propose a hybrid knowledge-injection framework that injects TSLM-generated insights directly into GRLM's reasoning trace, thereby achieving strong time-series reasoning with in-domain knowledge. As collecting data for knowledge injection fine-tuning is costly, we further leverage a reinforcement learning-based approach with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to elicit knowledge-rich traces without human supervision, then transfer such an in-domain thinking trace into GRLM for efficient knowledge injection. We further release SenTSR-Bench, a multivariate time-series-based diagnostic reasoning benchmark collected from real-world industrial operations. Across SenTSR-Bench and other public datasets, our method consistently surpasses TSLMs by 9.1%-26.1% and GRLMs by 7.9%-22.4%, delivering robust, context-aware time-series diagnostic insights.

Human Data Lens

Uses human feedback: No
Feedback types: None
Rater population: Unknown
Unit of annotation: Unknown
Expertise required: General

Evaluation Lens

Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
Agentic eval: None
Quality controls: Not reported
Confidence: 0.40
Flags: low_signal, possible_false_positive

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

Time-series diagnostic reasoning is essential for many applications, yet existing solutions face a persistent gap: general reasoning large language models (GRLMs) possess strong reasoning skills but lack the domain-specific knowledge to und
Conversely, fine-tuned time-series LLMs (TSLMs) understand these patterns but lack the capacity to generalize reasoning for more complicated questions.
To bridge this gap, we propose a hybrid knowledge-injection framework that injects TSLM-generated insights directly into GRLM's reasoning trace, thereby achieving strong time-series reasoning with in-domain knowledge.

Why It Matters For Eval

As collecting data for knowledge injection fine-tuning is costly, we further leverage a reinforcement learning-based approach with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to elicit knowledge-rich traces without human supervision, then transfer such an in
We further release SenTSR-Bench, a multivariate time-series-based diagnostic reasoning benchmark collected from real-world industrial operations.