Giorgio Bongiovanni
Frozen Intelligence: Aligning Time Series Patches to LLM Representations for Semi-Supervised Time Series Anomaly Detection.
Rel. Silvia Anna Chiusano, Luca Cagliero. Politecnico di Torino, Master of science program in Computer Engineering, 2026
Abstract
The emergence of Large Language Models as general-purpose sequence reasoners has opened new opportunities in time series analysis. TIME-LLM demonstrated that a frozen pre-trained LLM, when equipped with a learnable reprogramming layer that aligns patch-level time series representations with the model's token embedding space, can be repurposed for time series forecasting without modifying any of its weights. This thesis extends that insight to a fundamentally different task: semi-supervised anomaly detection on univariate time series. The proposed model follows a reconstruction-based paradigm. It is trained exclusively on anomaly-free segments of each time series, learning to predict the immediately succeeding time step; at inference, anomaly scores are derived from per-step reconstruction errors.
Beyond this re-purposing of the training objective, the thesis introduces three layers of architectural contribution: a statistical prompt construction strategy that encodes input-window properties as natural language context for the frozen LLM; four configurable output heads — flatten, MLP, temporal attention, and convolutional — each embodying a distinct inductive bias in mapping LLM representations to predictions; and five LLM output projection strategies — truncation, linear, MLP, GLU, and SwiGLU — for reducing high-dimensional hidden states to a compact working space
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