TimeWorld: Towards Action-Conditioned Multimodal World Models for Time Series Forecasting

Overview & Synopsis

Time series forecasting supports decision-making in web applications such as online retail and network management, where planned actions can reshape future dynamics. World models provide a natural paradigm for predicting such action-dependent changes beyond extrapolating historical patterns. However, existing time series world models (TSWMs) typically rely on fixed, domain-specific covariate schemas that limit flexible intervention specification, while multimodal forecasters treat text primarily as passive predictive context. To investigate these gaps, we introduce TSWM-Bench, a cross-domain benchmark for multimodal TSWMs spanning seven real-world datasets, with textual interventions grounded in recorded action--outcome data. Our evaluation reveals that conventional multimodal forecasters underperform history-only time series foundation models (TSFMs) despite dataset-specific training, whereas simple text-prefix adaptations improve forecasting across all evaluated TSFM backbones. These findings suggest that pretrained TSFMs encode implicit world knowledge of temporal dynamics, offering a strong foundation for action-conditioned modeling beyond conventional multimodal fusion. Building on this insight, we propose TimeWorld, a plug-in framework that adapts pretrained TSFMs through explicit action-response modeling. Specifically, the Prototype-Guided Latent Modulation (PLM) module grounds textual actions in temporal dynamics by composing representative response prototypes to modulate future representations based on the action and historical patterns. The Action Contrastive Learning (ACL) component strengthens action-specific response modeling by contrasting these updates under alternative interventions sharing the same history, distinguishing action types while preserving relative intensity relationships.