The underperformance of existing multimodal large language models for time series reasoning lies in the absence of rationale priors that connect temporal observations to their downstream outcomes, which leads models to rely on superficial pattern matching rather than principled reasoning. We therefore propose the rationale-grounded in-context learning for time series reasoning, where rationales work as guiding reasoning units rather than post-hoc explanations, and develop the RationaleTS method. Specifically, we firstly induce label-conditioned rationales, composed of reasoning paths from observable evidence to the potential outcomes. Then, we design the hybrid retrieval by balancing temporal patterns and semantic contexts to retrieve correlated rationale priors for the final in-context inference on new samples. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed RationaleTS on three-domain time series reasoning tasks. We provide the source code in https://github.com/yuppielqx/RationaleTS.

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a promising avenue for time series forecasting, offering the potential to integrate multimodal data. However, existing LLM-based approaches face notable limitations—such as marginalized role in model architectures, reliance on coarse statistical text prompts, and lack of interpretability. In this work, we introduce Augur, a fully LLM driven time series forecasting framework that exploits LLM causal reasoning to discover and use directed causal associations among covariates. Augur uses a two stage teacher student architecture where a powerful teacher LLM infers a directed causal graph from time series using heuristic search together with pairwise causality testing. A lightweight student agent then refines the graph and fine tune on high confidence causal associations that are encoded as rich textual prompts to perform forecasting. This design improves predictive accuracy while yielding transparent, traceable reasoning about variable interactions. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets with 25 baselines demonstrate that Augur achieves competitive performance and robust zero-shot generalization.

The LLMSR@XLLM25 formulates a low-resource structural reasoning task that challenges LLMs to generate interpretable, step-by-step rationales with minimal labeled data. We present Less is More, the third-place winning approach in the LLMSR@XLLM25, which focuses on structured reasoning from only 24 labeled examples. Our approach leverages a multi-agent framework with reverse-prompt induction, retrieval-augmented reasoning synthesis via GPT-4o, and dual-stage reward-guided filtering to distill high-quality supervision across three subtasks: question parsing, CoT parsing, and step-level verification. All modules are fine-tuned from Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct under a unified LoRA+ setup. By combining structure validation with reward filtering across few-shot and zero-shot prompts, our pipeline consistently improves structure reasoning quality. These results underscore the value of controllable data distillation in enhancing structured inference under low-resource constraints. Our code is available at https://github.com/JhCircle/Less-is-More.

Empathetic response generation necessitates the integration of emotional and intentional dynamics to foster meaningful interactions. Existing research either neglects the intricate interplay between emotion and intent, leading to suboptimal controllability of empathy, or resorts to large language models (LLMs), which incur significant computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce ReflectDiffu, a lightweight and comprehensive framework for empathetic response generation. This framework incorporates emotion contagion to augment emotional expressiveness and employs an emotion-reasoning mask to pinpoint critical emotional elements. Additionally, it integrates intent mimicry within reinforcement learning for refinement during diffusion. By harnessing an intent twice reflect mechanism of Exploring-Sampling-Correcting, ReflectDiffu adeptly translates emotional decision-making into precise intent actions, thereby addressing empathetic response misalignments stemming from emotional misrecognition. Through reflection, the framework maps emotional states to intents, markedly enhancing both response empathy and flexibility. Comprehensive experiments reveal that ReflectDiffu outperforms existing models regarding relevance, controllability, and informativeness, achieving state-of-the-art results in both automatic and human evaluations.