Time-R1: Towards Comprehensive Temporal Reasoning in LLMs
Authors: name: Zijia Liu; name: Peixuan Han; name: Haofei Yu; name: Haoru Li; name: Jiaxuan You
Published: 2025-05-16 13:46:28

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities but lack
robust temporal intelligence, struggling to integrate reasoning about the past
with predictions and plausible generations of the future. Meanwhile, existing
methods typically target isolated temporal skills, such as question answering
about past events or basic forecasting, and exhibit poor generalization,
particularly when dealing with events beyond their knowledge cutoff or
requiring creative foresight. To address these limitations, we introduce
Time-R1, the first framework to endow a moderate-sized (3B-parameter)
LLM with comprehensive temporal abilities: understanding, prediction, and
creative generation. Our approach features a novel three-stage development
path; the first two constitute a reinforcement learning (RL)
curriculum driven by a meticulously designed dynamic rule-based reward system.
This framework progressively builds (1) foundational temporal understanding and
logical event-time mappings from historical data, (2) future event prediction
skills for events beyond its knowledge cutoff, and finally (3) enables
remarkable generalization to creative future scenario generation without any
fine-tuning. Strikingly, experiments demonstrate that Time-R1 outperforms
models over 200 times larger, including the state-of-the-art 671B DeepSeek-R1,
on highly challenging future event prediction and creative scenario generation
benchmarks. This work provides strong evidence that thoughtfully engineered,
progressive RL fine-tuning allows smaller, efficient models to achieve superior
temporal performance, offering a practical and scalable path towards truly
time-aware AI. To foster further research, we also release Time-Bench,
a large-scale multi-task temporal reasoning dataset derived from 10 years of
news data, and our series of Time-R1 checkpoints.