TSFLab gives coding agents a shared, self-maintaining workbench for time-series research
AspireAI community · arXiv
Only about 20% of arXiv time-series forecasting papers release a code link, and released code still needs manual upkeep, so independent re-implementations drift apart in experimental settings. TSFLab proposes using AI agents for the benchmarking and maintenance work itself: it is a self-improving, agent-agnostic workbench that equips compatible coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex with shared resources and tools, aimed at cutting the cost and scaling limits of running an agent over a whole research project. The authors report that in reproduction and benchmarking, TSFLab improves task completion by 20-163% and cuts fresh tokens per completed task by 11-66% across baselines. A pilot study of agent-driven method development also shows improved forecasting accuracy, with 32.8-73.6% fewer fresh tokens and 9.2-68.8% less development time than the other settings. The honest limitation is scale: the reported gains come from the authors' own baselines and a pilot study rather than a large independent benchmark, and the workbench still needs a compatible coding agent to drive it.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.