temporal constraint
Don't PourCerealintoCoffee: Differentiable TemporalLogicforTemporalActionSegmentation
We propose Differentiable Temporal Logic (DTL), a model-agnostic framework that introduces temporal constraints to deep networks. DTL treats the outputs of a network as a truth assignment of a temporal logic formula, and computes a temporal logic loss reflecting the consistency between the output and the constraints.
Plan of Knowledge: Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Qian, Xinying, Zhang, Ying, Zhao, Yu, Zhou, Baohang, Sui, Xuhui, Yuan, Xiaojie
Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer time-sensitive questions by leveraging factual information from Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs). While previous studies have employed pre-trained TKG embeddings or graph neural networks to inject temporal knowledge, they fail to fully understand the complex semantic information of time constraints. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress, benefiting from their strong semantic understanding and reasoning generalization capabilities. However, their temporal reasoning ability remains limited. LLMs frequently suffer from hallucination and a lack of knowledge. To address these limitations, we propose the Plan of Knowledge framework with a contrastive temporal retriever, which is named PoK. Specifically, the proposed Plan of Knowledge module decomposes a complex temporal question into a sequence of sub-objectives from the pre-defined tools, serving as intermediate guidance for reasoning exploration. In parallel, we construct a Temporal Knowledge Store (TKS) with a contrastive retrieval framework, enabling the model to selectively retrieve semantically and temporally aligned facts from TKGs. By combining structured planning with temporal knowledge retrieval, PoK effectively enhances the interpretability and factual consistency of temporal reasoning. Extensive experiments on four benchmark TKGQA datasets demonstrate that PoK significantly improves the retrieval precision and reasoning accuracy of LLMs, surpassing the performance of the state-of-the-art TKGQA methods by 56.0% at most.
TCP: a Benchmark for Temporal Constraint-Based Planning
Ding, Zifeng, Yan, Sikuan, Yuan, Zhangdie, Hu, Xianglong, Lin, Fangru, Vlachos, Andreas
Temporal reasoning and planning are essential capabilities for large language models (LLMs), yet most existing benchmarks evaluate them in isolation and under limited forms of complexity. To address this gap, we introduce the Temporal Constraint-based Planning (TCP) benchmark that jointly assesses both capabilities. Each instance in TCP features a naturalistic dialogue around a collaborative project, where diverse and interdependent temporal constraints are explicitly or implicitly expressed, and models must infer an optimal schedule that satisfies all constraints. To construct TCP, we generate abstract problem prototypes that are then paired with realistic scenarios from various domains and enriched into dialogues using an LLM. A human quality check is performed on a sampled subset to confirm the reliability of our benchmark. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs and find that even the strongest models may struggle with TCP, highlighting its difficulty and revealing limitations in LLMs' temporal constraint-based planning abilities. We analyze underlying failure cases, open source our benchmark, and hope our findings can inspire future research.
Game-Time: Evaluating Temporal Dynamics in Spoken Language Models
Chang, Kai-Wei, Hu, En-Pei, Kuan, Chun-Yi, Ren, Wenze, Chen, Wei-Chih, Lin, Guan-Ting, Tsao, Yu, Sun, Shao-Hua, Lee, Hung-yi, Glass, James
Conversational Spoken Language Models (SLMs) are emerging as a promising paradigm for real-time speech interaction. However, their capacity of temporal dynamics, including the ability to manage timing, tempo and simultaneous speaking, remains a critical and unevaluated challenge for conversational fluency. To address this gap, we introduce the Game-Time Benchmark, a framework to systematically assess these temporal capabilities. Inspired by how humans learn a language through language activities, Game-Time consists of basic instruction-following tasks and advanced tasks with temporal constraints, such as tempo adherence and synchronized responses. Our evaluation of diverse SLM architectures reveals a clear performance disparity: while state-of-the-art models handle basic tasks well, many contemporary systems still struggle with fundamental instruction-following. More critically, nearly all models degrade substantially under temporal constraints, exposing persistent weaknesses in time awareness and full-duplex interaction. The Game-Time Benchmark provides a foundation for guiding future research toward more temporally-aware conversational AI. Demos and datasets are available on our project website https://ga642381.github.io/Game-Time.
Don't Pour Cereal into Coffee: Differentiable Temporal Logic for Temporal Action Segmentation Ziwei Xu Yogesh S Rawat Yongkang Wong Mohan S Kankanhalli Mubarak Shah
We propose Differentiable Temporal Logic (DTL), a model-agnostic framework that introduces temporal constraints to deep networks. DTL treats the outputs of a network as a truth assignment of a temporal logic formula, and computes a temporal logic loss reflecting the consistency between the output and the constraints. We propose a comprehensive set of constraints, which are implicit in data annotations, and incorporate them with deep networks via DTL. We evaluate the effectiveness of DTL on the temporal action segmentation task and observe improved performance and reduced logical errors in the output of different task models. Furthermore, we provide an extensive analysis to visualize the desirable effects of DTL. Figure 1: A video of activity "coffee preparation". The colored bars, from the top to the bottom, show the ground truth (GT), the predictions from a baseline [ 15 ], and the predictions from the baseline trained with DTL, respectively.
Reading Between the Timelines: RAG for Answering Diachronic Questions
Lau, Kwun Hang, Zhang, Ruiyuan, Shi, Weijie, Zhou, Xiaofang, Cheng, Xiaojun
While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) excels at injecting static, factual knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs), it exhibits a critical deficit in handling longitudinal queries that require tracking entities and phenomena across time. This blind spot arises because conventional, semantically-driven retrieval methods are not equipped to gather evidence that is both topically relevant and temporally coherent for a specified duration. We address this challenge by proposing a new framework that fundamentally redesigns the RAG pipeline to infuse temporal logic. Our methodology begins by disentangling a user's query into its core subject and its temporal window. It then employs a specialized retriever that calibrates semantic matching against temporal relevance, ensuring the collection of a contiguous evidence set that spans the entire queried period. To enable rigorous evaluation of this capability, we also introduce the Analytical Diachronic Question Answering Benchmark (ADQAB), a challenging evaluation suite grounded in a hybrid corpus of real and synthetic financial news. Empirical results on ADQAB show that our approach yields substantial gains in answer accuracy, surpassing standard RAG implementations by 13% to 27%. This work provides a validated pathway toward RAG systems capable of performing the nuanced, evolutionary analysis required for complex, real-world questions. The dataset and code for this study are publicly available at https://github.com/kwunhang/TA-RAG.
LazyVLM: Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Video Analytics
Jian, Xiangru, Pang, Wei, Dong, Zhengyuan, Zhang, Chao, รzsu, M. Tamer
Current video analytics approaches face a fundamental trade-off between flexibility and efficiency. End-to-end Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with long-context processing and incur high computational costs, while neural-symbolic methods depend heavily on manual labeling and rigid rule design. In this paper, we introduce LazyVLM, a neuro-symbolic video analytics system that provides a user-friendly query interface similar to VLMs, while addressing their scalability limitation. LazyVLM enables users to effortlessly drop in video data and specify complex multi-frame video queries using a semi-structured text interface for video analytics. To address the scalability limitations of VLMs, LazyVLM decomposes multi-frame video queries into fine-grained operations and offloads the bulk of the processing to efficient relational query execution and vector similarity search. We demonstrate that LazyVLM provides a robust, efficient, and user-friendly solution for querying open-domain video data at scale.
ExAnte: A Benchmark for Ex-Ante Inference in Large Language Models
Liu, Yachuan, Wei, Xiaochun, Shi, Lin, Li, Xinnuo, Zhang, Bohan, Dhillon, Paramveer, Mei, Qiaozhu
Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in ex-ante reasoning, where analysis, inference, or predictions must be made without access to information from future events. Even with explicit prompts enforcing temporal cutoffs, LLMs often generate outputs influenced by internalized knowledge of events beyond the specified cutoff. This paper introduces a novel task and benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LLMs to reason while adhering to such temporal constraints. The benchmark includes a variety of tasks: stock prediction, Wikipedia event prediction, scientific publication prediction, and Question Answering (QA), designed to assess factual knowledge under temporal cutoff constraints. We use leakage rate to quantify models' reliance on future information beyond cutoff timestamps. Experimental results reveal that LLMs struggle to consistently adhere to temporal cutoffs across common prompting strategies and tasks, demonstrating persistent challenges in ex-ante reasoning. This benchmark provides a potential evaluation framework to advance the development of LLMs' temporal reasoning ability for time-sensitive applications.