Two more papers from the DIG team accepted at #EMNLP2026 (Budapest, 24–29 October) – that makes three this year! Both tackle the same question: can we find complex events in multivariate time series from a natural-language description alone, with little or no labeled data?
👾 Grammar of the Wave: Towards Explainable Multivariate Time Series Event Detection via Neuro-Symbolic VLM Agents (main conference)
Sky Chenwei Wan, Yifei Y. Wang, Tianjun Hou, Xiqing Chang and Aymeric Jan
The paper introduces Language-guided Time Series Event Detection and proposes the Event Logic Tree (ELT), a symbolic framework that represents event semantics as compositional temporal logic, together with SELA, a zero-shot neuro-symbolic VLM multi-agent system that grounds ELTs in time series with interpretable evidence. On a new real-world benchmark, SELA outperforms supervised and zero/few-shot baselines.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11479
🤖 Language-Guided Time-Series Event Detection with Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Grounding (Findings of EMNLP)
Tianjun Hou, Xiqing Chang and Sky Chenwei Wan
GroundingMOMENT is the first time-series foundation model to bring open-vocabulary grounding to time series: it localizes complex events and their primitive components directly from natural-language descriptions. Trained only on synthetic data, it transfers zero-shot to real-world ECG and drilling signals, reaching near-agentic accuracy at up to ~40× lower latency.
Congratulations to the authors!
#NLP #TimeSeries #NeuroSymbolic #FoundationModels