A common goal in analyzing time series data is to understand how events cause observed variations. We study whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can infer natural language events associated with time series data.We introduce an automated method for generating tasks that test a model’s ability to reason about events associated with time series data based on sports data, and develop a new benchmarking method. In experiments spanning 18 LLMs, we prompt LLMs to infer unobserved events given time series data and observe surprising successes, even when providing minimal context. We then show that combining distillation with Reinforcement Learning (RL) can improve the performance for small language models to approach that of large proprietary reasoning models. All resources needed to reproduce our work are available: https://github.com/hartvigsen-group/GAMETime.

Large language models (LLMs) are known to perpetuate stereotypes and exhibit biases. Various strategies have been proposed to mitigate these biases, but most work studies biases as a black-box problem without considering how concepts are represented within the model. We adapt techniques from representation engineering to study how the concept of “gender” is represented within LLMs. We introduce a new method that extracts concept representations via probability weighting without labeled data and efficiently selects a steering vector for measuring and manipulating the model’s representation. We develop a projection-based method that enables precise steering of model predictions and demonstrate its effectiveness in mitigating gender bias in LLMs and show that it also generalizes to racial bias.