Pseudo-Alignment is a pervasive challenge in many large language models for time series (LLM4TS) models, often causing them to underperform compared to linear models or randomly initialised backbones. However, there is limited discussion in the community for the reasons that pseudo-alignment occurs. In this work, we conduct a thorough investigation into the root causes of pseudo-alignment in LLM4TS and build a connection of pseudo-alignment to the cone effect in LLM. We demonstrate that pseudo-alignment arises from the interplay of cone effect within pretrained LLM components and the intrinsically low-dimensional manifold of time-series data. In addition, we also introduce TimeSUP, a novel technique designed to mitigate this issue and improve forecast performance in existing LLM4TS approaches. TimeSUP addresses this by increasing the time series manifold to more closely match the intrinsic dimension of language embeddings, allowing the model to distinguish temporal signals clearly while still capturing shared structures across modalities. As a result, representations for time and language tokens remain distinct yet exhibit high cosine similarity, signifying that the model preserves each modality's unique features while learning their commonalities in a unified embedding space. Empirically, TimeSUP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM4TS methods and other lightweight baselines on long-term forecasting performance. Furthermore, it can be seamlessly integrated into four existing LLM4TS pipelines and delivers significant improvements in forecasting performance.

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) are neural architectures inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem that leverage B-spline parameterizations for flexible, locally adaptive function approximation. Although KANs can capture complex nonlinearities beyond those modeled by standard Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), they frequently exhibit miscalibrated confidence estimates-manifesting as overconfidence in dense data regions and underconfidence in sparse areas. In this work, we systematically examine the impact of four critical hyperparameters -- Layer Width, Grid Order, Shortcut Function, and Grid Range -- on the calibration of KANs. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Temperature-Scaled Loss (TSL) that integrates a temperature parameter directly into the training objective, dynamically adjusting the predictive distribution during learning. Both theoretical analysis and extensive empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that TSL significantly reduces calibration errors, thereby improving the reliability of probabilistic predictions. Overall, our study provides actionable insights into the design of spline-based neural networks and establishes TSL as a robust, loss-agnostic solution for enhancing calibration.

Classical overlap metrics such as Dice or IoU quantify where a medical-image segmentation falls short but say nothing about the confidence of each prediction. Over-confident errors are particularly dangerous in clinical practice, where a single false-positive voxel may trigger an unnecessary biopsy. We introduce three contributions that jointly address spatial precision and reliability. (i) Signed-Distance Calibration (SDC) loss couples cross-entropy, local calibration and a differentiable signed-distance penalty, enforcing boundary accuracy while moderating confidence. (ii) A Spatially Adaptive Margin (SAM) module applies lightweight morphological transforms to ground-truth masks before computing the local target, sharpening ambiguous edges. (iii) Pixel-wise Expected Calibration Error (pECE) extends ECE to millions of voxels and penalises high-confidence false positives. Across four public datasets (ACDC, FLARE, BraTS, PROSTATE) and two back-bones (U-Net, nnU-Net), SDC improves Dice by up to 4 percentage points and halves ECE compared with the state of the art, without sacrificing runtime. Code is available on: https://github.com/EagleAdelaide/SDC-Loss.