VerbalTS: Generating Time Series from Texts

Time series synthesis has become a foundational task in modern society, underpinning decisionmaking across various scenes. Recent approaches primarily generate time series from structured conditions, such as attribute-based metadata. However, these methods struggle to capture the full complexity of time series, as the predefined structures often fail to reflect intricate temporal dynamics or other nuanced characteristics. Moreover, constructing structured metadata requires expert knowledge, making large-scale data labeling costly and impractical. In this paper, we introduce VERBALTS, a novel framework for generating time series from unstructured textual descriptions, offering a more expressive and flexible solution to time series synthesis. To bridge the gap between unstructured text and time series data, VERBALTS employs a multi-focal alignment and generation framework, effectively modeling their complex relationships. Experiments on two synthetic and four real-world datasets demonstrate that VERBALTS outperforms existing methods in both generation quality and semantic alignment with textual conditions. The project page is at https://seqml.github.io/VerbalTS/ .