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Jul 7

MixLinear: Extreme Low Resource Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with 0.1K Parameters

Recently, there has been a growing interest in Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF), which involves predicting long-term future values by analyzing a large amount of historical time-series data to identify patterns and trends. There exist significant challenges in LTSF due to its complex temporal dependencies and high computational demands. Although Transformer-based models offer high forecasting accuracy, they are often too compute-intensive to be deployed on devices with hardware constraints. On the other hand, the linear models aim to reduce the computational overhead by employing either decomposition methods in the time domain or compact representations in the frequency domain. In this paper, we propose MixLinear, an ultra-lightweight multivariate time series forecasting model specifically designed for resource-constrained devices. MixLinear effectively captures both temporal and frequency domain features by modeling intra-segment and inter-segment variations in the time domain and extracting frequency variations from a low-dimensional latent space in the frequency domain. By reducing the parameter scale of a downsampled n-length input/output one-layer linear model from O(n^2) to O(n), MixLinear achieves efficient computation without sacrificing accuracy. Extensive evaluations with four benchmark datasets show that MixLinear attains forecasting performance comparable to, or surpassing, state-of-the-art models with significantly fewer parameters (0.1K), which makes it well-suited for deployment on devices with limited computational capacity.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024

CoRA: Covariate-Aware Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have shown significant impact through their model capacity, scalability, and zero-shot generalization. However, due to the heterogeneity of inter-variate dependencies and the backbone scalability on large-scale multivariate datasets, most TSFMs are typically pre-trained on univariate time series. This limitation renders them oblivious to crucial information from diverse covariates in real-world forecasting tasks. To further enhance the performance of TSFMs, we propose a general covariate-aware adaptation (CoRA) framework for TSFMs. It leverages pre-trained backbones of foundation models while effectively incorporating exogenous covariates from various modalities, including time series, language, and images, to improve the quality of predictions. Technically, CoRA maintains the equivalence of initialization and parameter consistency during adaptation. With preserved backbones of foundation models as frozen feature extractors, the outcome embeddings from foundation models are empirically demonstrated more informative than raw data. Further, CoRA employs a novel Granger Causality Embedding (GCE) to automatically evaluate covariates regarding their causal predictability with respect to the target variate. We incorporate these weighted embeddings with a zero-initialized condition-injection mechanism, avoiding catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained foundation models and gradually integrates exogenous information. Extensive experiments show that CoRA of TSFMs surpasses state-of-the-art covariate-aware deep forecasters with full or few-shot training samples, achieving 31.1% MSE reduction on covariate-aware forecasting. Compared to other adaptation methods, CoRA exhibits strong compatibility with various advanced TSFMs and extends the scope of covariates to other modalities, presenting a practical paradigm for the application of TSFMs.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 14, 2025

GinAR: An End-To-End Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Model Suitable for Variable Missing

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) is crucial for decision-making to precisely forecast the future values/trends, based on the complex relationships identified from historical observations of multiple sequences. Recently, Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have gradually become the theme of MTSF model as their powerful capability in mining spatial-temporal dependencies, but almost of them heavily rely on the assumption of historical data integrity. In reality, due to factors such as data collector failures and time-consuming repairment, it is extremely challenging to collect the whole historical observations without missing any variable. In this case, STGNNs can only utilize a subset of normal variables and easily suffer from the incorrect spatial-temporal dependency modeling issue, resulting in the degradation of their forecasting performance. To address the problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Graph Interpolation Attention Recursive Network (named GinAR) to precisely model the spatial-temporal dependencies over the limited collected data for forecasting. In GinAR, it consists of two key components, that is, interpolation attention and adaptive graph convolution to take place of the fully connected layer of simple recursive units, and thus are capable of recovering all missing variables and reconstructing the correct spatial-temporal dependencies for recursively modeling of multivariate time series data, respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world datasets demonstrate that GinAR outperforms 11 SOTA baselines, and even when 90% of variables are missing, it can still accurately predict the future values of all variables.

  • 7 authors
·
May 17, 2024

TiRex-2: Generalizing TiRex to Multivariate Data and Streaming

We introduce TiRex-2, a recurrent xLSTM-based time series foundation model that generalizes the univariate TiRex to multivariate forecasting with both past and future covariates. Real-world forecasting is inherently sequential: observations arrive continuously, variables evolve jointly, and a subset of covariates is known ahead of time. Existing Transformer-based time series foundation models capture cross-variate dependencies but incur quadratic complexity in context length and require full-history recomputation as new observations arrive. TiRex-2 addresses these limitations through a memory-centric recurrent design that operates at constant per-patch cost under streaming. The model combines a bidirectional time mixer with an asymmetric grouped-attention variate mixer, enabling the integration of future-known covariates while preserving strict causality over target variables. To our knowledge, this is the first time series foundation model that achieves this combination of properties. To support scalable multivariate pretraining, we propose a synthetic coupling pipeline that composes diverse multivariate samples on the fly from large univariate corpora. Empirically, TiRex-2 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on GIFT-Eval and fev-bench, remains stable when streamed to arbitrary context lengths, and maintains constant inference cost per patch. The model uses 38.4M active parameters in univariate mode, with an additional 44.1M parameters activated for multivariate forecasting.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 30

Falcon-X: A Time Series Foundation Model for Heterogeneous Multivariate Modeling

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are transforming the forecasting paradigm through large-scale cross-domain pretraining. However, most existing TSFMs remain univariate, and recent efforts to enable cross-variate modeling still operate directly within the raw variate space. This design introduces fundamental limitations in semantic alignment and relational expressivity. Specifically, raw-space group mixing lacks a dedicated mechanism to align heterogeneous physical quantities, while standard non-negative attention fails to capture the complex synergistic and antagonistic interactions ubiquitous in real-world systems. To address these challenges, we propose Falcon-X, decouples variates from the raw space and maps them into a unified latent prototype space. Falcon-X employs a Unified Prototype Diff-Attention mechanism that explicitly evaluates both positive and negative semantic affinities to explicitly align heterogeneous variates. Cross-variate interactions are then efficiently performed within this shared space via Latent Entity Attention, naturally facilitating zero-shot structural transfer. Finally, a Variate Reassembly Router robustly reconstructs variate-specific trajectories via a request-and-dispatch mechanism. Extensive evaluations on the GIFT-Eval and fev-bench benchmarks demonstrate that Falcon-X achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance, offering a principled and scalable paradigm for complex multivariate environments. Falcon-X is publicly released to support future research.

  • 8 authors
·
May 25

Efficient Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Calibrated Language Models with Privileged Knowledge Distillation

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) endeavors to predict future observations given historical data, playing a crucial role in time series data management systems. With advancements in large language models (LLMs), recent studies employ textual prompt tuning to infuse the knowledge of LLMs into MTSF. However, the deployment of LLMs often suffers from low efficiency during the inference phase. To address this problem, we introduce TimeKD, an efficient MTSF framework that leverages the calibrated language models and privileged knowledge distillation. TimeKD aims to generate high-quality future representations from the proposed cross-modality teacher model and cultivate an effective student model. The cross-modality teacher model adopts calibrated language models (CLMs) with ground truth prompts, motivated by the paradigm of Learning Under Privileged Information (LUPI). In addition, we design a subtractive cross attention (SCA) mechanism to refine these representations. To cultivate an effective student model, we propose an innovative privileged knowledge distillation (PKD) mechanism including correlation and feature distillation. PKD enables the student to replicate the teacher's behavior while minimizing their output discrepancy. Extensive experiments on real data offer insight into the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of the proposed TimeKD.

  • 8 authors
·
May 4, 2025

TSGym: Design Choices for Deep Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

Recently, deep learning has driven significant advancements in multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) tasks. However, much of the current research in MTSF tends to evaluate models from a holistic perspective, which obscures the individual contributions and leaves critical issues unaddressed. Adhering to the current modeling paradigms, this work bridges these gaps by systematically decomposing deep MTSF methods into their core, fine-grained components like series-patching tokenization, channel-independent strategy, attention modules, or even Large Language Models and Time-series Foundation Models. Through extensive experiments and component-level analysis, our work offers more profound insights than previous benchmarks that typically discuss models as a whole. Furthermore, we propose a novel automated solution called TSGym for MTSF tasks. Unlike traditional hyperparameter tuning, neural architecture searching or fixed model selection, TSGym performs fine-grained component selection and automated model construction, which enables the creation of more effective solutions tailored to diverse time series data, therefore enhancing model transferability across different data sources and robustness against distribution shifts. Extensive experiments indicate that TSGym significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art MTSF and AutoML methods. All code is publicly available on https://github.com/SUFE-AILAB/TSGym.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 21, 2025

Can Multimodal LLMs Perform Time Series Anomaly Detection?

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used in time series analysis. However, the potential of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), particularly vision-language models, for time series remains largely under-explored. One natural way for humans to detect time series anomalies is through visualization and textual description. Motivated by this, we raise a critical and practical research question: Can multimodal LLMs perform time series anomaly detection? To answer this, we propose VisualTimeAnomaly benchmark to evaluate MLLMs in time series anomaly detection (TSAD). Our approach transforms time series numerical data into the image format and feed these images into various MLLMs, including proprietary models (GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5) and open-source models (LLaVA-NeXT and Qwen2-VL), each with one larger and one smaller variant. In total, VisualTimeAnomaly contains 12.4k time series images spanning 3 scenarios and 3 anomaly granularities with 9 anomaly types across 8 MLLMs. Starting with the univariate case (point- and range-wise anomalies), we extend our evaluation to more practical scenarios, including multivariate and irregular time series scenarios, and variate-wise anomalies. Our study reveals several key insights: 1) MLLMs detect range- and variate-wise anomalies more effectively than point-wise anomalies. 2) MLLMs are highly robust to irregular time series, even with 25% of the data missing. 3) Open-source MLLMs perform comparably to proprietary models in TSAD. While open-source MLLMs excel on univariate time series, proprietary MLLMs demonstrate superior effectiveness on multivariate time series. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to comprehensively investigate MLLMs for TSAD, particularly for multivariate and irregular time series scenarios. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/mllm-ts/VisualTimeAnomaly to support future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 24, 2025

Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?

Recently, there has been a surge of Transformer-based solutions for the long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) task. Despite the growing performance over the past few years, we question the validity of this line of research in this work. Specifically, Transformers is arguably the most successful solution to extract the semantic correlations among the elements in a long sequence. However, in time series modeling, we are to extract the temporal relations in an ordered set of continuous points. While employing positional encoding and using tokens to embed sub-series in Transformers facilitate preserving some ordering information, the nature of the permutation-invariant self-attention mechanism inevitably results in temporal information loss. To validate our claim, we introduce a set of embarrassingly simple one-layer linear models named LTSF-Linear for comparison. Experimental results on nine real-life datasets show that LTSF-Linear surprisingly outperforms existing sophisticated Transformer-based LTSF models in all cases, and often by a large margin. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive empirical studies to explore the impacts of various design elements of LTSF models on their temporal relation extraction capability. We hope this surprising finding opens up new research directions for the LTSF task. We also advocate revisiting the validity of Transformer-based solutions for other time series analysis tasks (e.g., anomaly detection) in the future. Code is available at: https://github.com/cure-lab/LTSF-Linear.

  • 4 authors
·
May 26, 2022

Chimera: Effectively Modeling Multivariate Time Series with 2-Dimensional State Space Models

Modeling multivariate time series is a well-established problem with a wide range of applications from healthcare to financial markets. Traditional State Space Models (SSMs) are classical approaches for univariate time series modeling due to their simplicity and expressive power to represent linear dependencies. They, however, have fundamentally limited expressive power to capture non-linear dependencies, are slow in practice, and fail to model the inter-variate information flow. Despite recent attempts to improve the expressive power of SSMs by using deep structured SSMs, the existing methods are either limited to univariate time series, fail to model complex patterns (e.g., seasonal patterns), fail to dynamically model the dependencies of variate and time dimensions, and/or are input-independent. We present Chimera that uses two input-dependent 2-D SSM heads with different discretization processes to learn long-term progression and seasonal patterns. To improve the efficiency of complex 2D recurrence, we present a fast training using a new 2-dimensional parallel selective scan. We further present and discuss 2-dimensional Mamba and Mamba-2 as the spacial cases of our 2D SSM. Our experimental evaluation shows the superior performance of Chimera on extensive and diverse benchmarks, including ECG and speech time series classification, long-term and short-term time series forecasting, and time series anomaly detection.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024 1

TFMAdapter: Lightweight Instance-Level Adaptation of Foundation Models for Forecasting with Covariates

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in univariate forecasting on new time series simply by conditioned on a brief history of past values. Their success demonstrates that large-scale pretraining across diverse domains can acquire the inductive bias to generalize from temporal patterns in a brief history. However, most TSFMs are unable to leverage covariates -- future-available exogenous variables critical for accurate forecasting in many applications -- due to their domain-specific nature and the lack of associated inductive bias. We propose TFMAdapter, a lightweight, instance-level adapter that augments TSFMs with covariate information without fine-tuning. Instead of retraining, TFMAdapter operates on the limited history provided during a single model call, learning a non-parametric cascade that combines covariates with univariate TSFM forecasts. However, such learning would require univariate forecasts at all steps in the history, requiring too many calls to the TSFM. To enable training on the full historical context while limiting TSFM invocations, TFMAdapter uses a two-stage method: (1) generating pseudo-forecasts with a simple regression model, and (2) training a Gaussian Process regressor to refine predictions using both pseudo- and TSFM forecasts alongside covariates. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TFMAdapter consistently outperforms both foundation models and supervised baselines, achieving a 24-27\% improvement over base foundation models with minimal data and computational overhead. Our results highlight the potential of lightweight adapters to bridge the gap between generic foundation models and domain-specific forecasting needs.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

TimeCMA: Towards LLM-Empowered Time Series Forecasting via Cross-Modality Alignment

The widespread adoption of scalable mobile sensing has led to large amounts of time series data for real-world applications. A fundamental application is multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF), which aims to predict future time series values based on historical observations. Existing MTSF methods suffer from limited parameterization and small-scale training data. Recently, Large language models (LLMs) have been introduced in time series, which achieve promising forecasting performance but incur heavy computational costs. To solve these challenges, we propose TimeCMA, an LLM-empowered framework for time series forecasting with cross-modality alignment. We design a dual-modality encoding module with two branches, where the time series encoding branch extracts relatively low-quality yet pure embeddings of time series through an inverted Transformer. In addition, the LLM-empowered encoding branch wraps the same time series as prompts to obtain high-quality yet entangled prompt embeddings via a Pre-trained LLM. Then, we design a cross-modality alignment module to retrieve high-quality and pure time series embeddings from the prompt embeddings. Moreover, we develop a time series forecasting module to decode the aligned embeddings while capturing dependencies among multiple variables for forecasting. Notably, we tailor the prompt to encode sufficient temporal information into a last token and design the last token embedding storage to reduce computational costs. Extensive experiments on real data offer insight into the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed framework.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 2, 2024

Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks

Modeling multivariate time series has long been a subject that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including economics, finance, and traffic. A basic assumption behind multivariate time series forecasting is that its variables depend on one another but, upon looking closely, it is fair to say that existing methods fail to fully exploit latent spatial dependencies between pairs of variables. In recent years, meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high capability in handling relational dependencies. GNNs require well-defined graph structures for information propagation which means they cannot be applied directly for multivariate time series where the dependencies are not known in advance. In this paper, we propose a general graph neural network framework designed specifically for multivariate time series data. Our approach automatically extracts the uni-directed relations among variables through a graph learning module, into which external knowledge like variable attributes can be easily integrated. A novel mix-hop propagation layer and a dilated inception layer are further proposed to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies within the time series. The graph learning, graph convolution, and temporal convolution modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on 3 of 4 benchmark datasets and achieves on-par performance with other approaches on two traffic datasets which provide extra structural information.

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2020

MRMS-Net and LMRMS-Net: Scalable Multi-Representation Multi-Scale Networks for Time Series Classification

Time series classification (TSC) performance depends not only on architectural design but also on the diversity of input representations. In this work, we propose a scalable multi-scale convolutional framework that systematically integrates structured multi-representation inputs for univariate time series. We introduce two architectures: MRMS-Net, a hierarchical multi-scale convolutional network optimized for robustness and calibration, and LMRMS-Net, a lightweight variant designed for efficiency-aware deployment. In addition, we adapt LiteMV -- originally developed for multivariate inputs -- to operate on multi-representation univariate signals, enabling cross-representation interaction. We evaluate all models across 142 benchmark datasets under a unified experimental protocol. Critical Difference (CD) analysis confirms statistically significant performance differences among the top models. Results show that LiteMV achieves the highest mean accuracy, MRMS-Net provides superior probabilistic calibration (lowest NLL), and LMRMS-Net offers the best efficiency-accuracy tradeoff. Pareto analysis further demonstrates that multi-representation multi-scale modeling yields a flexible design space that can be tuned for accuracy-oriented, calibration-oriented, or resource-constrained settings. These findings establish scalable multi-representation multi-scale learning as a principled and practical direction for modern TSC. Reference implementation of MRMS-Net and LMRMS-Net is available at: https://github.com/alagoz/mrmsnet-tsc

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 24

RoLA: A Real-Time Online Lightweight Anomaly Detection System for Multivariate Time Series

A multivariate time series refers to observations of two or more variables taken from a device or a system simultaneously over time. There is an increasing need to monitor multivariate time series and detect anomalies in real time to ensure proper system operation and good service quality. It is also highly desirable to have a lightweight anomaly detection system that considers correlations between different variables, adapts to changes in the pattern of the multivariate time series, offers immediate responses, and provides supportive information regarding detection results based on unsupervised learning and online model training. In the past decade, many multivariate time series anomaly detection approaches have been introduced. However, they are unable to offer all the above-mentioned features. In this paper, we propose RoLA, a real-time online lightweight anomaly detection system for multivariate time series based on a divide-and-conquer strategy, parallel processing, and the majority rule. RoLA employs multiple lightweight anomaly detectors to monitor multivariate time series in parallel, determine the correlations between variables dynamically on the fly, and then jointly detect anomalies based on the majority rule in real time. To demonstrate the performance of RoLA, we conducted an experiment based on a public dataset provided by the FerryBox of the One Ocean Expedition. The results show that RoLA provides satisfactory detection accuracy and lightweight performance.

  • 2 authors
·
May 25, 2023

Large Language Models are Few-shot Multivariate Time Series Classifiers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively applied in time series analysis. Yet, their utility in the few-shot classification (i.e., a crucial training scenario due to the limited training data available in industrial applications) concerning multivariate time series data remains underexplored. We aim to leverage the extensive pre-trained knowledge in LLMs to overcome the data scarcity problem within multivariate time series. Specifically, we propose LLMFew, an LLM-enhanced framework to investigate the feasibility and capacity of LLMs for few-shot multivariate time series classification. This model introduces a Patch-wise Temporal Convolution Encoder (PTCEnc) to align time series data with the textual embedding input of LLMs. We further fine-tune the pre-trained LLM decoder with Low-rank Adaptations (LoRA) to enhance its feature representation learning ability in time series data. Experimental results show that our model outperformed state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin, achieving 125.2% and 50.2% improvement in classification accuracy on Handwriting and EthanolConcentration datasets, respectively. Moreover, our experimental results demonstrate that LLM-based methods perform well across a variety of datasets in few-shot MTSC, delivering reliable results compared to traditional models. This success paves the way for their deployment in industrial environments where data are limited.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 29, 2025

CALF: Aligning LLMs for Time Series Forecasting via Cross-modal Fine-Tuning

Deep learning (e.g., Transformer) has been widely and successfully used in multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF). Unlike existing methods that focus on training models from a single modal of time series input, large language models (LLMs) based MTSF methods with cross-modal text and time series input have recently shown great superiority, especially with limited temporal data. However, current LLM-based MTSF methods usually focus on adapting and fine-tuning LLMs, while neglecting the distribution discrepancy between textual and temporal input tokens, thus leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Cross-Modal LLM Fine-Tuning (CALF) framework for MTSF by reducing the distribution discrepancy between textual and temporal data, which mainly consists of the temporal target branch with temporal input and the textual source branch with aligned textual input. To reduce the distribution discrepancy, we develop the cross-modal match module to first align cross-modal input distributions. Additionally, to minimize the modality distribution gap in both feature and output spaces, feature regularization loss is developed to align the intermediate features between the two branches for better weight updates, while output consistency loss is introduced to allow the output representations of both branches to correspond effectively. Thanks to the modality alignment, CALF establishes state-of-the-art performance for both long-term and short-term forecasting tasks with low computational complexity, and exhibiting favorable few-shot and zero-shot abilities similar to that in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Hank0626/LLaTA.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

Beyond Holistic Models: Systematic Component-level Benchmarking of Deep Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

While previous research in multivariate time series forecasting has focused on developing complex holistic models, this work advocates for a shift toward a granular, component-level understanding of their impacts. We propose TSCOMP, the first large-scale benchmark that systematically deconstructs deep forecasting methods into their core, fine-grained components--spanning series preprocessing, encoding strategies, network architectures including specific and large time-series models, and optimization methods. Using constrained orthogonal experimental design and extensive evaluations, we conduct multi-view analyses that reveal component effectiveness across different backbones, data characteristics, and their interactions. Beyond providing insights, this benchmark establishes a fine-grained performance corpus comprising over 20,000 model-dataset evaluations, which supports the learning of automated component selection, enabling zero-shot model construction on new datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that the corpus-driven approach, despite its simplicity, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the soundness of our evaluation design and confirming that systematic component selection surpasses manually designed complex architectures. All code and the performance corpus are publicly available at https://github.com/SUFE-AILAB/TSCOMP.

  • 7 authors
·
May 25 2

It's TIME: Towards the Next Generation of Time Series Forecasting Benchmarks

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are revolutionizing the forecasting landscape from specific dataset modeling to generalizable task evaluation. However, we contend that existing benchmarks exhibit common limitations in four dimensions: constrained data composition dominated by reused legacy sources, compromised data integrity lacking rigorous quality assurance, misaligned task formulations detached from real-world contexts, and rigid analysis perspectives that obscure generalizable insights. To bridge these gaps, we introduce TIME, a next-generation task-centric benchmark comprising 50 fresh datasets and 98 forecasting tasks, tailored for strict zero-shot TSFM evaluation free from data leakage. Integrating large language models and human expertise, we establish a rigorous human-in-the-loop benchmark construction pipeline to ensure high data integrity and redefine task formulation by aligning forecasting configurations with real-world operational requirements and variate predictability. Furthermore, we propose a novel pattern-level evaluation perspective that moves beyond traditional dataset-level evaluations based on static meta labels. By leveraging structural time series features to characterize intrinsic temporal properties, this approach offers generalizable insights into model capabilities across diverse patterns. We evaluate 12 representative TSFMs and establish a multi-granular leaderboard to facilitate in-depth analysis and visualized inspection. The leaderboard is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Real-TSF/TIME-leaderboard.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 3

TimeRFT: Stimulating Generalizable Time Series Forecasting for TSFMs via Reinforcement Finetuning

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) advance generalization and data efficiency in time series forecasting by unified large-scale pretraining. But TSFMs remain lacking when adapting to specific downstream forecasting tasks for two reasons. First, the non-stationary and uncertain nature of time series data lead to inevitable temporal distribution shifts between historical training and future testing data, while current Supervised FineTuning (SFT)-based methods are prone to overfitting and may degrade generalization. Second, training data availability varies across forecasting tasks, requiring TSFMs to generalize well under diverse data regimes. To address these challenges, we introduce the Time series Reinforcement Finetuning (TimeRFT) paradigm for TSFM downstream adaptation, which consists of two task-specific training recipes: i) A forecasting quality-based temporal reward mechanism that conducts a multi-faceted evaluation of the contribution of each prediction step to overall forecasting accuracy. ii) A forecasting difficulty-based data selection strategy to identify time series samples with generalizable predictive patterns and informative training signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate TimeRFT can consistently outperform SFT-based adaptation methods across various real-world forecasting tasks and training data regimes, enhancing prediction accuracy and generalization against unforeseen distribution shifts.

HKUSTGZ HKUSTGZ
·
Apr 17

IMTS is Worth Time times Channel Patches: Visual Masked Autoencoders for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Prediction

Irregular Multivariate Time Series (IMTS) forecasting is challenging due to the unaligned nature of multi-channel signals and the prevalence of extensive missing data. Existing methods struggle to capture reliable temporal patterns from such data due to significant missing values. While pre-trained foundation models show potential for addressing these challenges, they are typically designed for Regularly Sampled Time Series (RTS). Motivated by the visual Mask AutoEncoder's (MAE) powerful capability for modeling sparse multi-channel information and its success in RTS forecasting, we propose VIMTS, a framework adapting Visual MAE for IMTS forecasting. To mitigate the effect of missing values, VIMTS first processes IMTS along the timeline into feature patches at equal intervals. These patches are then complemented using learned cross-channel dependencies. Then it leverages visual MAE's capability in handling sparse multichannel data for patch reconstruction, followed by a coarse-to-fine technique to generate precise predictions from focused contexts. In addition, we integrate self-supervised learning for improved IMTS modeling by adapting the visual MAE to IMTS data. Extensive experiments demonstrate VIMTS's superior performance and few-shot capability, advancing the application of visual foundation models in more general time series tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/WHU-HZY/VIMTS.

sanae-ai-lab Sanae AI Lab
·
May 29, 2025

Is Mamba Effective for Time Series Forecasting?

In the realm of time series forecasting (TSF), it is imperative for models to adeptly discern and distill hidden patterns within historical time series data to forecast future states. Transformer-based models exhibit formidable efficacy in TSF, primarily attributed to their advantage in apprehending these patterns. However, the quadratic complexity of the Transformer leads to low computational efficiency and high costs, which somewhat hinders the deployment of the TSF model in real-world scenarios. Recently, Mamba, a selective state space model, has gained traction due to its ability to process dependencies in sequences while maintaining near-linear complexity. For TSF tasks, these characteristics enable Mamba to comprehend hidden patterns as the Transformer and reduce computational overhead compared to the Transformer. Therefore, we propose a Mamba-based model named Simple-Mamba (S-Mamba) for TSF. Specifically, we tokenize the time points of each variate autonomously via a linear layer. A bidirectional Mamba layer is utilized to extract inter-variate correlations and a Feed-Forward Network is set to learn temporal dependencies. Finally, the generation of forecast outcomes through a linear mapping layer. Experiments on thirteen public datasets prove that S-Mamba maintains low computational overhead and achieves leading performance. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to explore Mamba's potential in TSF tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/wzhwzhwzh0921/S-D-Mamba.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 17, 2024

A Flexible Parametric Modelling Framework for Survival Analysis

We introduce a general, flexible, parametric survival modelling framework which encompasses key shapes of hazard function (constant, increasing, decreasing, up-then-down, down-then-up), various common survival distributions (log-logistic, Burr type XII, Weibull, Gompertz), and includes defective distributions (i.e., cure models). This generality is achieved using four basic distributional parameters: two scale-type parameters and two shape parameters. Generalising to covariate dependence, the scale-type regression components correspond to accelerated failure time (AFT) and proportional hazards (PH) models. Therefore, this general formulation unifies the most popular survival models which allows us to consider the practical value of possible modelling choices for survival data. Furthermore, in line with our proposed flexible baseline distribution, we advocate the use of multi-parameter regression in which more than one distributional parameter depends on covariates - rather than the usual convention of having a single covariate-dependent (scale) parameter. While many choices are available, we suggest introducing covariates through just one or other of the two scale parameters, which covers AFT and PH models, in combination with a `power' shape parameter, which allows for more complex non-AFT/non-PH effects, while the other shape parameter remains covariate-independent, and handles automatic selection of the baseline distribution. We explore inferential issues in simulations, both with and without a covariate, with particular focus on evidence concerning the need, or otherwise, to include both AFT and PH parameters. We illustrate the efficacy of our modelling framework by investigating differences between treatment groups using data from a lung cancer study and a melanoma study. Censoring is accommodated throughout.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 10, 2019

Two-stage Estimation of Latent Variable Regression Models: A General, Root-N Consistent Solution

Latent variable (LV) models are widely used in psychological research to investigate relationships among unobservable constructs. When one-stage estimation of the overall LV model is challenging, two-stage factor score regression (FSR) serves as a convenient alternative: the measurement model is fitted to obtain factor scores in the first stage, which are then used to fit the structural model in the subsequent stage. However, naive application of FSR is known to yield biased estimates of structural parameters. In this paper, we develop a generic bias-correction framework for two-stage estimation of parametric statistical models and tailor it specifically to FSR. Unlike existing bias-corrected FSR solutions, the proposed method applies to a broader class of LV models and does not require computing specific types of factor scores. We establish the root-n consistency of the proposed bias-corrected two-stage estimator under mild regularity conditions. To ensure broad applicability and minimize reliance on complex analytical derivations, we introduce a stochastic approximation algorithm for point estimation and a Monte Carlo-based procedure for variance estimation. In a sequence of Monte Carlo experiments, we demonstrate that the bias-corrected FSR estimator performs comparably to the ``gold standard'' one-stage maximum likelihood estimator. These results suggest that our approach offers a straightforward yet effective alternative for estimating LV models.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 24

OLinear: A Linear Model for Time Series Forecasting in Orthogonally Transformed Domain

This paper presents OLinear, a linear-based multivariate time series forecasting model that operates in an orthogonally transformed domain. Recent forecasting models typically adopt the temporal forecast (TF) paradigm, which directly encode and decode time series in the time domain. However, the entangled step-wise dependencies in series data can hinder the performance of TF. To address this, some forecasters conduct encoding and decoding in the transformed domain using fixed, dataset-independent bases (e.g., sine and cosine signals in the Fourier transform). In contrast, we utilize OrthoTrans, a data-adaptive transformation based on an orthogonal matrix that diagonalizes the series' temporal Pearson correlation matrix. This approach enables more effective encoding and decoding in the decorrelated feature domain and can serve as a plug-in module to enhance existing forecasters. To enhance the representation learning for multivariate time series, we introduce a customized linear layer, NormLin, which employs a normalized weight matrix to capture multivariate dependencies. Empirically, the NormLin module shows a surprising performance advantage over multi-head self-attention, while requiring nearly half the FLOPs. Extensive experiments on 24 benchmarks and 140 forecasting tasks demonstrate that OLinear consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency. Notably, as a plug-in replacement for self-attention, the NormLin module consistently enhances Transformer-based forecasters. The code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OLinear

  • 8 authors
·
May 12, 2025

Linear equivalence of nonlinear recurrent neural networks

Large nonlinear recurrent neural networks with random couplings generate high-dimensional, potentially chaotic activity whose structure is of interest in neuroscience and other fields. A fundamental object encoding the collective structure of this activity is the N times N covariance matrix. Prior analytical work on the covariance matrix has been limited to low-dimensional summary statistics. Recent work proposed an ansatz in which, at large N, the covariance matrix for a typical quenched realization takes the same form as that of a linear network with the same couplings, driven by independent noise, with DMFT order parameters setting the transfer function and the noise spectrum. Here, we derive this ansatz using the two-site cavity method, providing two derivations with complementary perspectives. The first decomposes each unit's activity into a linear response to its local field and a nonlinear residual, and shows that cross-covariances between residuals at distinct sites are strongly suppressed, so the residuals act as independent noise driving a linear network. The second derives a self-consistent matrix equation for the covariance matrix. A naive Gaussian closure for the joint statistics of local fields at distinct sites misses cross terms that, in a linear network, would be generated by an external drive. The cavity method recovers these terms from non-Gaussian contributions, revealing an emergent external drive. Higher-order cross-site moments follow a Wick-like decomposition into products of pairwise covariances at leading order, reducing them to the linear-equivalent form. We verify the predictions in simulations. These results extend linear equivalence from feedforward high-dimensional nonlinear systems, where the activations are independent of the weights, to recurrent networks, where the activations are correlated with the couplings that generate them.

  • 1 authors
·
May 4

Multi-resolution Networks For Flexible Irregular Time Series Modeling (Multi-FIT)

Missing values, irregularly collected samples, and multi-resolution signals commonly occur in multivariate time series data, making predictive tasks difficult. These challenges are especially prevalent in the healthcare domain, where patients' vital signs and electronic records are collected at different frequencies and have occasionally missing information due to the imperfections in equipment or patient circumstances. Researchers have handled each of these issues differently, often handling missing data through mean value imputation and then using sequence models over the multivariate signals while ignoring the different resolution of signals. We propose a unified model named Multi-resolution Flexible Irregular Time series Network (Multi-FIT). The building block for Multi-FIT is the FIT network. The FIT network creates an informative dense representation at each time step using signal information such as last observed value, time difference since the last observed time stamp and overall mean for the signal. Vertical FIT (FIT-V) is a variant of FIT which also models the relationship between different temporal signals while creating the informative dense representations for the signal. The multi-FIT model uses multiple FIT networks for sets of signals with different resolutions, further facilitating the construction of flexible representations. Our model has three main contributions: a.) it does not impute values but rather creates informative representations to provide flexibility to the model for creating task-specific representations b.) it models the relationship between different signals in the form of support signals c.) it models different resolutions in parallel before merging them for the final prediction task. The FIT, FIT-V and Multi-FIT networks improve upon the state-of-the-art models for three predictive tasks, including the forecasting of patient survival.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 30, 2019

One-connection rule for structural equation models

Linear structural equation models are multivariate statistical models encoded by mixed graphs. In particular, the set of covariance matrices for distributions belonging to a linear structural equation model for a fixed mixed graph G=(V, D,B) is parameterized by a rational function with parameters for each vertex and edge in G. This rational parametrization naturally allows for the study of these models from an algebraic and combinatorial point of view. Indeed, this point of view has led to a collection of results in the literature, mainly focusing on questions related to identifiability and determining relationships between covariances (i.e., finding polynomials in the Gaussian vanishing ideal). So far, a large proportion of these results has focused on the case when D, the directed part of the mixed graph G, is acyclic. This is due to the fact that in the acyclic case, the parametrization becomes polynomial and there is a description of the entries of the covariance matrices in terms of a finite sum. We move beyond the acyclic case and give a closed form expression for the entries of the covariance matrices in terms of the one-connections in a graph obtained from D through some small operations. This closed form expression then allows us to show that if G is simple, then the parametrization map is generically finite-to-one. Finally, having a closed form expression for the covariance matrices allows for the development of an algorithm for systematically exploring possible polynomials in the Gaussian vanishing ideal.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 1, 2022

FourierGNN: Rethinking Multivariate Time Series Forecasting from a Pure Graph Perspective

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting has shown great importance in numerous industries. Current state-of-the-art graph neural network (GNN)-based forecasting methods usually require both graph networks (e.g., GCN) and temporal networks (e.g., LSTM) to capture inter-series (spatial) dynamics and intra-series (temporal) dependencies, respectively. However, the uncertain compatibility of the two networks puts an extra burden on handcrafted model designs. Moreover, the separate spatial and temporal modeling naturally violates the unified spatiotemporal inter-dependencies in real world, which largely hinders the forecasting performance. To overcome these problems, we explore an interesting direction of directly applying graph networks and rethink MTS forecasting from a pure graph perspective. We first define a novel data structure, hypervariate graph, which regards each series value (regardless of variates or timestamps) as a graph node, and represents sliding windows as space-time fully-connected graphs. This perspective considers spatiotemporal dynamics unitedly and reformulates classic MTS forecasting into the predictions on hypervariate graphs. Then, we propose a novel architecture Fourier Graph Neural Network (FourierGNN) by stacking our proposed Fourier Graph Operator (FGO) to perform matrix multiplications in Fourier space. FourierGNN accommodates adequate expressiveness and achieves much lower complexity, which can effectively and efficiently accomplish the forecasting. Besides, our theoretical analysis reveals FGO's equivalence to graph convolutions in the time domain, which further verifies the validity of FourierGNN. Extensive experiments on seven datasets have demonstrated our superior performance with higher efficiency and fewer parameters compared with state-of-the-art methods.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 9, 2023

Less Is More: Fast Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Light Sampling-oriented MLP Structures

Multivariate time series forecasting has seen widely ranging applications in various domains, including finance, traffic, energy, and healthcare. To capture the sophisticated temporal patterns, plenty of research studies designed complex neural network architectures based on many variants of RNNs, GNNs, and Transformers. However, complex models are often computationally expensive and thus face a severe challenge in training and inference efficiency when applied to large-scale real-world datasets. In this paper, we introduce LightTS, a light deep learning architecture merely based on simple MLP-based structures. The key idea of LightTS is to apply an MLP-based structure on top of two delicate down-sampling strategies, including interval sampling and continuous sampling, inspired by a crucial fact that down-sampling time series often preserves the majority of its information. We conduct extensive experiments on eight widely used benchmark datasets. Compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods, LightTS demonstrates better performance on five of them and comparable performance on the rest. Moreover, LightTS is highly efficient. It uses less than 5% FLOPS compared with previous SOTA methods on the largest benchmark dataset. In addition, LightTS is robust and has a much smaller variance in forecasting accuracy than previous SOTA methods in long sequence forecasting tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 4, 2022

Chronos-2: From Univariate to Universal Forecasting

Pretrained time series models have enabled inference-only forecasting systems that produce accurate predictions without task-specific training. However, existing approaches largely focus on univariate forecasting, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where multivariate data and covariates play a crucial role. We present Chronos-2, a pretrained model capable of handling univariate, multivariate, and covariate-informed forecasting tasks in a zero-shot manner. Chronos-2 employs a group attention mechanism that facilitates in-context learning (ICL) through efficient information sharing across multiple time series within a group, which may represent sets of related series, variates of a multivariate series, or targets and covariates in a forecasting task. These general capabilities are achieved through training on synthetic datasets that impose diverse multivariate structures on univariate series. Chronos-2 delivers state-of-the-art performance across three comprehensive benchmarks: fev-bench, GIFT-Eval, and Chronos Benchmark II. On fev-bench, which emphasizes multivariate and covariate-informed forecasting, Chronos-2's universal ICL capabilities lead to substantial improvements over existing models. On tasks involving covariates, it consistently outperforms baselines by a wide margin. Case studies in the energy and retail domains further highlight its practical advantages. The in-context learning capabilities of Chronos-2 establish it as a general-purpose forecasting model that can be used "as is" in real-world forecasting pipelines.

amazon Amazon
·
Oct 17, 2025 3

MSGNet: Learning Multi-Scale Inter-Series Correlations for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting poses an ongoing challenge across various disciplines. Time series data often exhibit diverse intra-series and inter-series correlations, contributing to intricate and interwoven dependencies that have been the focus of numerous studies. Nevertheless, a significant research gap remains in comprehending the varying inter-series correlations across different time scales among multiple time series, an area that has received limited attention in the literature. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces MSGNet, an advanced deep learning model designed to capture the varying inter-series correlations across multiple time scales using frequency domain analysis and adaptive graph convolution. By leveraging frequency domain analysis, MSGNet effectively extracts salient periodic patterns and decomposes the time series into distinct time scales. The model incorporates a self-attention mechanism to capture intra-series dependencies, while introducing an adaptive mixhop graph convolution layer to autonomously learn diverse inter-series correlations within each time scale. Extensive experiments are conducted on several real-world datasets to showcase the effectiveness of MSGNet. Furthermore, MSGNet possesses the ability to automatically learn explainable multi-scale inter-series correlations, exhibiting strong generalization capabilities even when applied to out-of-distribution samples.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 31, 2023

Taking ROCKET on an Efficiency Mission: Multivariate Time Series Classification with LightWaveS

Nowadays, with the rising number of sensors in sectors such as healthcare and industry, the problem of multivariate time series classification (MTSC) is getting increasingly relevant and is a prime target for machine and deep learning approaches. Their expanding adoption in real-world environments is causing a shift in focus from the pursuit of ever-higher prediction accuracy with complex models towards practical, deployable solutions that balance accuracy and parameters such as prediction speed. An MTSC model that has attracted attention recently is ROCKET, based on random convolutional kernels, both because of its very fast training process and its state-of-the-art accuracy. However, the large number of features it utilizes may be detrimental to inference time. Examining its theoretical background and limitations enables us to address potential drawbacks and present LightWaveS: a framework for accurate MTSC, which is fast both during training and inference. Specifically, utilizing wavelet scattering transformation and distributed feature selection, we manage to create a solution that employs just 2.5% of the ROCKET features, while achieving accuracy comparable to recent MTSC models. LightWaveS also scales well across multiple compute nodes and with the number of input channels during training. In addition, it can significantly reduce the input size and provide insight to an MTSC problem by keeping only the most useful channels. We present three versions of our algorithm and their results on distributed training time and scalability, accuracy, and inference speedup. We show that we achieve speedup ranging from 9x to 53x compared to ROCKET during inference on an edge device, on datasets with comparable accuracy.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 4, 2022

Can Generative Geospatial Diffusion Models Excel as Discriminative Geospatial Foundation Models?

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has revolutionized representation learning in Remote Sensing (RS), advancing Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) to leverage vast unlabeled satellite imagery for diverse downstream tasks. Currently, GFMs primarily focus on discriminative objectives, such as contrastive learning or masked image modeling, owing to their proven success in learning transferable representations. However, generative diffusion models--which demonstrate the potential to capture multi-grained semantics essential for RS tasks during image generation--remain underexplored for discriminative applications. This prompts the question: can generative diffusion models also excel and serve as GFMs with sufficient discriminative power? In this work, we answer this question with SatDiFuser, a framework that transforms a diffusion-based generative geospatial foundation model into a powerful pretraining tool for discriminative RS. By systematically analyzing multi-stage, noise-dependent diffusion features, we develop three fusion strategies to effectively leverage these diverse representations. Extensive experiments on remote sensing benchmarks show that SatDiFuser outperforms state-of-the-art GFMs, achieving gains of up to +5.7% mIoU in semantic segmentation and +7.9% F1-score in classification, demonstrating the capacity of diffusion-based generative foundation models to rival or exceed discriminative GFMs. Code will be released.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

VSFormer: Value and Shape-Aware Transformer with Prior-Enhanced Self-Attention for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Multivariate time series classification is a crucial task in data mining, attracting growing research interest due to its broad applications. While many existing methods focus on discovering discriminative patterns in time series, real-world data does not always present such patterns, and sometimes raw numerical values can also serve as discriminative features. Additionally, the recent success of Transformer models has inspired many studies. However, when applying to time series classification, the self-attention mechanisms in Transformer models could introduce classification-irrelevant features, thereby compromising accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method, VSFormer, that incorporates both discriminative patterns (shape) and numerical information (value). In addition, we extract class-specific prior information derived from supervised information to enrich the positional encoding and provide classification-oriented self-attention learning, thereby enhancing its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on all 30 UEA archived datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to SOTA models. Through ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved encoding layer and the proposed self-attention mechanism. Finally, We provide a case study on a real-world time series dataset without discriminative patterns to interpret our model.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 21, 2024

MedTsLLM: Leveraging LLMs for Multimodal Medical Time Series Analysis

The complexity and heterogeneity of data in many real-world applications pose significant challenges for traditional machine learning and signal processing techniques. For instance, in medicine, effective analysis of diverse physiological signals is crucial for patient monitoring and clinical decision-making and yet highly challenging. We introduce MedTsLLM, a general multimodal large language model (LLM) framework that effectively integrates time series data and rich contextual information in the form of text to analyze physiological signals, performing three tasks with clinical relevance: semantic segmentation, boundary detection, and anomaly detection in time series. These critical tasks enable deeper analysis of physiological signals and can provide actionable insights for clinicians. We utilize a reprogramming layer to align embeddings of time series patches with a pretrained LLM's embedding space and make effective use of raw time series, in conjunction with textual context. Given the multivariate nature of medical datasets, we develop methods to handle multiple covariates. We additionally tailor the text prompt to include patient-specific information. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including deep learning models, other LLMs, and clinical methods across multiple medical domains, specifically electrocardiograms and respiratory waveforms. MedTsLLM presents a promising step towards harnessing the power of LLMs for medical time series analysis that can elevate data-driven tools for clinicians and improve patient outcomes.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

Pay Attention to Evolution: Time Series Forecasting with Deep Graph-Evolution Learning

Time-series forecasting is one of the most active research topics in artificial intelligence. Applications in real-world time series should consider two factors for achieving reliable predictions: modeling dynamic dependencies among multiple variables and adjusting the model's intrinsic hyperparameters. A still open gap in that literature is that statistical and ensemble learning approaches systematically present lower predictive performance than deep learning methods. They generally disregard the data sequence aspect entangled with multivariate data represented in more than one time series. Conversely, this work presents a novel neural network architecture for time-series forecasting that combines the power of graph evolution with deep recurrent learning on distinct data distributions; we named our method Recurrent Graph Evolution Neural Network (ReGENN). The idea is to infer multiple multivariate relationships between co-occurring time-series by assuming that the temporal data depends not only on inner variables and intra-temporal relationships (i.e., observations from itself) but also on outer variables and inter-temporal relationships (i.e., observations from other-selves). An extensive set of experiments was conducted comparing ReGENN with dozens of ensemble methods and classical statistical ones, showing sound improvement of up to 64.87% over the competing algorithms. Furthermore, we present an analysis of the intermediate weights arising from ReGENN, showing that by looking at inter and intra-temporal relationships simultaneously, time-series forecasting is majorly improved if paying attention to how multiple multivariate data synchronously evolve.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 28, 2020

FRWKV+: Periodic-Aware Adaptive Gating for Frequency-Space Linear Time Series Forecasting

Accurate and efficient long-term multivariate time series forecasting requires capturing recurring temporal structure while keeping inference cheap across many variables and horizons. Frequency-space models represent long-range and periodic variation compactly, but they typically process the real and imaginary spectral components as weakly coupled streams and treat periodic cues as ordinary input features, even when such cues are unreliable. This paper proposes FRWKV-Plus, a lightweight periodic-aware frequency-space forecasting model built on the efficient FRWKV backbone. FRWKV-Plus introduces a cross-branch spectral gate that reweights each spectral branch using a summary of its sibling branch, and a trust-gated residual correction that converts compact within-period context into a bounded, sign-flexible adjustment of these gates under a learned, data-dependent trust score. By construction, the correction is identity-preserving at initialization and strictly bounded, so periodic evidence can refine but never dominate or invert the base interaction. On seven standard benchmarks, FRWKV-Plus is consistently competitive with strong linear, frequency-domain, recurrent-style, and Transformer-based forecasters while preserving the lightweight profile of the backbone. Controlled three-seed ablations show that each component contributes, that the benefit is modest on strongly periodic data and pronounced on the harder Exchange and ILI datasets, and that the within-period context is the most influential single component. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/yangqingyuan-byte/FRWKV-plus.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 6

MPTSNet: Integrating Multiscale Periodic Local Patterns and Global Dependencies for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC) is crucial in extensive practical applications, such as environmental monitoring, medical EEG analysis, and action recognition. Real-world time series datasets typically exhibit complex dynamics. To capture this complexity, RNN-based, CNN-based, Transformer-based, and hybrid models have been proposed. Unfortunately, current deep learning-based methods often neglect the simultaneous construction of local features and global dependencies at different time scales, lacking sufficient feature extraction capabilities to achieve satisfactory classification accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Multiscale Periodic Time Series Network (MPTSNet), which integrates multiscale local patterns and global correlations to fully exploit the inherent information in time series. Recognizing the multi-periodicity and complex variable correlations in time series, we use the Fourier transform to extract primary periods, enabling us to decompose data into multiscale periodic segments. Leveraging the inherent strengths of CNN and attention mechanism, we introduce the PeriodicBlock, which adaptively captures local patterns and global dependencies while offering enhanced interpretability through attention integration across different periodic scales. The experiments on UEA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MPTSNet outperforms 21 existing advanced baselines in the MTSC tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025

D-CTNet: A Dual-Branch Channel-Temporal Forecasting Network with Frequency-Domain Correction

Accurate Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting is crucial for collaborative design of complex systems, Digital Twin building, and maintenance ahead of time. However, the collaborative industrial environment presents new challenges for MTS forecasting models: models should decouple complex inter-variable dependencies while addressing non-stationary distribution shift brought by environmental changes. To address these challenges and improve collaborative sensing reliability, we propose a Patch-Based Dual-Branch Channel-Temporal Forecasting Network (D-CTNet). Particularly, with a parallel dual-branch design incorporating linear temporal modeling layer and channel attention mechanism, our method explicitly decouples and jointly learns intra-channel temporal evolution patterns and dynamic multivariate correlations. Furthermore, a global patch attention fusion module goes beyond the local window scope to model long range dependencies. Most importantly, aiming at non-stationarity, a Frequency-Domain Stationarity Correction mechanism adaptively suppresses distribution shift impacts from environment change by spectrum alignment. Evaluations on seven benchmark datasets show that our model achieves better forecasting accuracy and robustness compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our work shows great promise as a new forecasting engine for industrial collaborative systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 30, 2025

Revisiting Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Missing Values

Missing values are common in real-world time series, and multivariate time series forecasting with missing values (MTSF-M) has become a crucial area of research for ensuring reliable predictions. To address the challenge of missing data, current approaches have developed an imputation-then-prediction framework that uses imputation modules to fill in missing values, followed by forecasting on the imputed data. However, this framework overlooks a critical issue: there is no ground truth for the missing values, making the imputation process susceptible to errors that can degrade prediction accuracy. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study and reveal that imputation without direct supervision can corrupt the underlying data distribution and actively degrade prediction accuracy. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift that moves away from imputation and directly predicts from the partially observed time series. We introduce Consistency-Regularized Information Bottleneck (CRIB), a novel framework built on the Information Bottleneck principle. CRIB combines a unified-variate attention mechanism with a consistency regularization scheme to learn robust representations that filter out noise introduced by missing values while preserving essential predictive signals. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CRIB, which predicts accurately even under high missing rates. Our code is available in https://github.com/Muyiiiii/CRIB.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 27, 2025

MoHETS: Long-term Time Series Forecasting with Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts

Real-world multivariate time series can exhibit intricate multi-scale structures, including global trends, local periodicities, and non-stationary regimes, which makes long-horizon forecasting challenging. Although sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approaches improve scalability and specialization, they typically rely on homogeneous MLP experts that poorly capture the diverse temporal dynamics of time series data. We address these limitations with MoHETS, an encoder-only Transformer that integrates sparse Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts (MoHE) layers. MoHE routes temporal patches to a small subset of expert networks, combining a shared depthwise-convolution expert for sequence-level continuity with routed Fourier-based experts for patch-level periodic structures. MoHETS further improves robustness to non-stationary dynamics by incorporating exogenous information via cross-attention over covariate patch embeddings. Finally, we replace parameter-heavy linear projection heads with a lightweight convolutional patch decoder, improving parameter efficiency, reducing training instability, and allowing a single model to generalize across arbitrary forecast horizons. We validate across seven multivariate benchmarks and multiple horizons, with MoHETS consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance, reducing the average MSE by 12% compared to strong recent baselines, demonstrating effective heterogeneous specialization for long-term forecasting.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 29 1

Machine Learning with Multitype Protected Attributes: Intersectional Fairness through Regularisation

Ensuring equitable treatment (fairness) across protected attributes (such as gender or ethnicity) is a critical issue in machine learning. Most existing literature focuses on binary classification, but achieving fairness in regression tasks-such as insurance pricing or hiring score assessments-is equally important. Moreover, anti-discrimination laws also apply to continuous attributes, such as age, for which many existing methods are not applicable. In practice, multiple protected attributes can exist simultaneously; however, methods targeting fairness across several attributes often overlook so-called "fairness gerrymandering", thereby ignoring disparities among intersectional subgroups (e.g., African-American women or Hispanic men). In this paper, we propose a distance covariance regularisation framework that mitigates the association between model predictions and protected attributes, in line with the fairness definition of demographic parity, and that captures both linear and nonlinear dependencies. To enhance applicability in the presence of multiple protected attributes, we extend our framework by incorporating two multivariate dependence measures based on distance covariance: the previously proposed joint distance covariance (JdCov) and our novel concatenated distance covariance (CCdCov), which effectively address fairness gerrymandering in both regression and classification tasks involving protected attributes of various types. We discuss and illustrate how to calibrate regularisation strength, including a method based on Jensen-Shannon divergence, which quantifies dissimilarities in prediction distributions across groups. We apply our framework to the COMPAS recidivism dataset and a large motor insurance claims dataset.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 9, 2025

TFB: Towards Comprehensive and Fair Benchmarking of Time Series Forecasting Methods

Time series are generated in diverse domains such as economic, traffic, health, and energy, where forecasting of future values has numerous important applications. Not surprisingly, many forecasting methods are being proposed. To ensure progress, it is essential to be able to study and compare such methods empirically in a comprehensive and reliable manner. To achieve this, we propose TFB, an automated benchmark for Time Series Forecasting (TSF) methods. TFB advances the state-of-the-art by addressing shortcomings related to datasets, comparison methods, and evaluation pipelines: 1) insufficient coverage of data domains, 2) stereotype bias against traditional methods, and 3) inconsistent and inflexible pipelines. To achieve better domain coverage, we include datasets from 10 different domains: traffic, electricity, energy, the environment, nature, economic, stock markets, banking, health, and the web. We also provide a time series characterization to ensure that the selected datasets are comprehensive. To remove biases against some methods, we include a diverse range of methods, including statistical learning, machine learning, and deep learning methods, and we also support a variety of evaluation strategies and metrics to ensure a more comprehensive evaluations of different methods. To support the integration of different methods into the benchmark and enable fair comparisons, TFB features a flexible and scalable pipeline that eliminates biases. Next, we employ TFB to perform a thorough evaluation of 21 Univariate Time Series Forecasting (UTSF) methods on 8,068 univariate time series and 14 Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF) methods on 25 datasets. The benchmark code and data are available at https://github.com/decisionintelligence/TFB. We have also launched an online time series leaderboard: https://decisionintelligence.github.io/OpenTS/OpenTS-Bench/.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 29, 2024

Fast multivariate empirical cumulative distribution function with connection to kernel density estimation

This paper revisits the problem of computing empirical cumulative distribution functions (ECDF) efficiently on large, multivariate datasets. Computing an ECDF at one evaluation point requires O(N) operations on a dataset composed of N data points. Therefore, a direct evaluation of ECDFs at N evaluation points requires a quadratic O(N^2) operations, which is prohibitive for large-scale problems. Two fast and exact methods are proposed and compared. The first one is based on fast summation in lexicographical order, with a O(N{log}N) complexity and requires the evaluation points to lie on a regular grid. The second one is based on the divide-and-conquer principle, with a O(Nlog(N)^{(d-1){vee}1}) complexity and requires the evaluation points to coincide with the input points. The two fast algorithms are described and detailed in the general d-dimensional case, and numerical experiments validate their speed and accuracy. Secondly, the paper establishes a direct connection between cumulative distribution functions and kernel density estimation (KDE) for a large class of kernels. This connection paves the way for fast exact algorithms for multivariate kernel density estimation and kernel regression. Numerical tests with the Laplacian kernel validate the speed and accuracy of the proposed algorithms. A broad range of large-scale multivariate density estimation, cumulative distribution estimation, survival function estimation and regression problems can benefit from the proposed numerical methods.

  • 2 authors
·
May 24, 2020

Generative Pre-Trained Diffusion Paradigm for Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, generative pre-trained paradigms such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Models (LVMs) have achieved revolutionary advancements and widespread real-world applications. Particularly, the emergence of pre-trained LLMs-based temporal works, compared to previous deep model approaches, has demonstrated superior generalization and robustness, showcasing the potential of generative pre-trained paradigms as foundation models for time series. However, those LLMs-based works mainly focus on cross-modal research, i.e., leveraging the language capabilities of LLMs in time series contexts. Although they have achieved impressive performance, there still exist the issues of concept drift caused by differences in data distribution and inflexibility caused by misalignment of dimensions. To this end, inspired by recent work on LVMs, we reconsider the paradigm of time series modeling. In this paper, we comprehensively explore, for the first time, the effectiveness and superiority of the Generative Pre-trained Diffusion (GPD) paradigm in real-world multivariate time series forecasting (TSF). Specifically, to mitigate performance bias introduced by sophisticated networks, we propose a straightforward MLP diffusion network for unconditional modeling of time series. Then we employ a zero-shot and tuning-free method to predict (generate) future data using historical data as prompts. The GPD paradigm is established on the time series modality, effectively preventing the phenomenon of concept drift, and enabling flexible forecasting of arbitrary lengths. We demonstrate that the GPD paradigm achieves comprehensive performance and generalization comparable to current SOTA LLM-based and deep model paradigms on mainstream benchmarks and various TSF tasks. Extensive experiments validate the potential of the GPD paradigm and its assistance in future related research.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 4, 2024

CSTS: A Benchmark for the Discovery of Correlation Structures in Time Series Clustering

Time series clustering promises to uncover hidden structural patterns in data with applications across healthcare, finance, industrial systems, and other critical domains. However, without validated ground truth information, researchers cannot objectively assess clustering quality or determine whether poor results stem from absent structures in the data, algorithmic limitations, or inappropriate validation methods, raising the question whether clustering is "more art than science" (Guyon et al., 2009). To address these challenges, we introduce CSTS (Correlation Structures in Time Series), a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the discovery of correlation structures in multivariate time series data. CSTS provides a clean benchmark that enables researchers to isolate and identify specific causes of clustering failures by differentiating between correlation structure deterioration and limitations of clustering algorithms and validation methods. Our contributions are: (1) a comprehensive benchmark for correlation structure discovery with distinct correlation structures, systematically varied data conditions, established performance thresholds, and recommended evaluation protocols; (2) empirical validation of correlation structure preservation showing moderate distortion from downsampling and minimal effects from distribution shifts and sparsification; and (3) an extensible data generation framework enabling structure-first clustering evaluation. A case study demonstrates CSTS's practical utility by identifying an algorithm's previously undocumented sensitivity to non-normal distributions, illustrating how the benchmark enables precise diagnosis of methodological limitations. CSTS advances rigorous evaluation standards for correlation-based time series clustering.

  • 4 authors
·
May 20, 2025

TTS-VAR: A Test-Time Scaling Framework for Visual Auto-Regressive Generation

Scaling visual generation models is essential for real-world content creation, yet requires substantial training and computational expenses. Alternatively, test-time scaling has garnered growing attention due to resource efficiency and promising performance. In this work, we present TTS-VAR, the first general test-time scaling framework for visual auto-regressive (VAR) models, modeling the generation process as a path searching problem. To dynamically balance computational efficiency with exploration capacity, we first introduce an adaptive descending batch size schedule throughout the causal generation process. Besides, inspired by VAR's hierarchical coarse-to-fine multi-scale generation, our framework integrates two key components: (i) At coarse scales, we observe that generated tokens are hard for evaluation, possibly leading to erroneous acceptance of inferior samples or rejection of superior samples. Noticing that the coarse scales contain sufficient structural information, we propose clustering-based diversity search. It preserves structural variety through semantic feature clustering, enabling later selection on samples with higher potential. (ii) In fine scales, resampling-based potential selection prioritizes promising candidates using potential scores, which are defined as reward functions incorporating multi-scale generation history. Experiments on the powerful VAR model Infinity show a notable 8.7% GenEval score improvement (from 0.69 to 0.75). Key insights reveal that early-stage structural features effectively influence final quality, and resampling efficacy varies across generation scales. Code is available at https://github.com/ali-vilab/TTS-VAR.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 24, 2025 2

Subset Selection Based On Multiple Rankings in the Presence of Bias: Effectiveness of Fairness Constraints for Multiwinner Voting Score Functions

We consider the problem of subset selection where one is given multiple rankings of items and the goal is to select the highest ``quality'' subset. Score functions from the multiwinner voting literature have been used to aggregate rankings into quality scores for subsets. We study this setting of subset selection problems when, in addition, rankings may contain systemic or unconscious biases toward a group of items. For a general model of input rankings and biases, we show that requiring the selected subset to satisfy group fairness constraints can improve the quality of the selection with respect to unbiased rankings. Importantly, we show that for fairness constraints to be effective, different multiwinner score functions may require a drastically different number of rankings: While for some functions, fairness constraints need an exponential number of rankings to recover a close-to-optimal solution, for others, this dependency is only polynomial. This result relies on a novel notion of ``smoothness'' of submodular functions in this setting that quantifies how well a function can ``correctly'' assess the quality of items in the presence of bias. The results in this paper can be used to guide the choice of multiwinner score functions for the subset selection setting considered here; we additionally provide a tool to empirically enable this.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 16, 2023

Teaching Time Series to See and Speak: Forecasting with Aligned Visual and Textual Perspectives

Time series forecasting traditionally relies on unimodal numerical inputs, which often struggle to capture high-level semantic patterns due to their dense and unstructured nature. While recent approaches have explored representing time series as text using large language models (LLMs), these methods remain limited by the discrete nature of token sequences and lack the perceptual intuition humans typically apply, such as interpreting visual patterns. In this paper, we propose a multimodal contrastive learning framework that transforms raw time series into structured visual and textual perspectives. Rather than using natural language or real-world images, we construct both modalities directly from numerical sequences. We then align these views in a shared semantic space via contrastive learning, enabling the model to capture richer and more complementary representations. Furthermore, we introduce a variate selection module that leverages the aligned representations to identify the most informative variables for multivariate forecasting. Extensive experiments on fifteen short-term and six long-term forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms strong unimodal and cross-modal baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of multimodal alignment in enhancing time series forecasting. Code is available at: https://github.com/Ironieser/TimesCLIP.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 30, 2025

Kairos: Towards Adaptive and Generalizable Time Series Foundation Models

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for time series analysis, driven by large-scale pretraining on diverse data corpora. However, time series inherently exhibit heterogeneous information density over time, influenced by system states and signal complexity, presenting significant modeling challenges especially in a zero-shot scenario. Current TSFMs rely on non-adaptive processing pipelines that fail to capture this dynamic nature. For example, common tokenization strategies such as fixed-size patching enforce rigid observational granularity, limiting their ability to adapt to varying information densities. Similarly, conventional positional encodings impose a uniform temporal scale, making it difficult to model diverse periodicities and trends across series. To overcome these limitations, we propose Kairos, a flexible TSFM framework that integrates a dynamic patching tokenizer and an instance-adaptive positional embedding. Kairos adaptively selects tokenization granularity and tailors positional encodings to the unique characteristics of each time series instance. Trained on a large-scale Predictability-Stratified Time Series (PreSTS) corpus comprising over 300 billion time points and adopting a multi-patch prediction strategy in the inference stage, Kairos achieves superior performance with much fewer parameters on two common zero-shot benchmarks, GIFT-Eval and the Time-Series-Library benchmark, consistently outperforming established methods across diverse tasks. The project page is at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/Kairos .

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025

KARMA: A Multilevel Decomposition Hybrid Mamba Framework for Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate long-term and efficient time series forecasting is a key requirement for a variety of practical applications, and there are complex interleaving time dynamics in time series data that require decomposition modeling. Traditional time series decomposition methods are single and rely on fixed rules, which are insufficient for mining the potential information of the series and adapting to the dynamic characteristics of complex series. On the other hand, the Transformer-based models for time series forecasting struggle to effectively model long sequences and intricate dynamic relationships due to their high computational complexity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce KARMA, with an Adaptive Time Channel Decomposition module (ATCD) to dynamically extract trend and seasonal components. It further integrates a Hybrid Frequency-Time Decomposition module (HFTD) to further decompose Series into frequency-domain and time-domain. These components are coupled with multi-scale Mamba-based KarmaBlock to efficiently process global and local information in a coordinated manner. Experiments on eight real-world datasets from diverse domains well demonstrated that KARMA significantly outperforms mainstream baseline methods in both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. Code and full results are available at this repository: https://github.com/yedadasd/KARMA

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 10, 2025

ATM Cash demand forecasting in an Indian Bank with chaos and deep learning

This paper proposes to model chaos in the ATM cash withdrawal time series of a big Indian bank and forecast the withdrawals using deep learning methods. It also considers the importance of day-of-the-week and includes it as a dummy exogenous variable. We first modelled the chaos present in the withdrawal time series by reconstructing the state space of each series using the lag, and embedding dimension found using an auto-correlation function and Cao's method. This process converts the uni-variate time series into multi variate time series. The "day-of-the-week" is converted into seven features with the help of one-hot encoding. Then these seven features are augmented to the multivariate time series. For forecasting the future cash withdrawals, using algorithms namely ARIMA, random forest (RF), support vector regressor (SVR), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), group method of data handling (GMDH), general regression neural network (GRNN), long short term memory neural network and 1-dimensional convolutional neural network. We considered a daily cash withdrawals data set from an Indian commercial bank. After modelling chaos and adding exogenous features to the data set, we observed improvements in the forecasting for all models. Even though the random forest (RF) yielded better Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE) value, deep learning algorithms, namely LSTM and 1D CNN, showed similar performance compared to RF, based on t-test.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 24, 2020

UrbanWell: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatio-Temporal Urban Wellbeing Analytics

Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We introduce UrbanWell, a large-scale benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs for urban wellbeing analytics through joint modeling of satellite and street view imagery. UrbanWell spans 38 cities across multiple years and includes diverse indicators covering (1) environmental conditions (CO_2, NO_2, PM{2.5}, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), (2) spatial accessibility (minimum distance to supermarkets and restaurants), (3) urban form (road length, road density, and land use), (4) urban vitality (population, economic activity diversity, and land use diversity), and (5) subjective perception attributes (e.g., safety, beauty, liveliness, wealth, and quietness). All indicators are aligned at grid level to enable standardized evaluation. Beyond static prediction, UrbanWell defines temporal reasoning tasks, including future value forecasting from historical observations and temporal trend classification. We benchmark 15 state-of-the-art representative MLLMs in a zero-shot setting, providing a comprehensive comparative evaluation across spatial and temporal dimensions. Experimental results indicate that while MLLMs capture salient spatial and perceptual cues, their performance varies substantially across heterogeneous urban indicators spanning environment and subjective perception. UrbanWell serves as a unified benchmark for evaluating multimodal spatial and temporal reasoning in urban wellbeing analytics, offering a standardized testbed for systematic assessment and future research on multimodal urban intelligence. Our codes and datasets are accessible via https://github.com/axin1301/UrbanWell-Benchmark.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 13

ShapeFormer: Shapelet Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Multivariate time series classification (MTSC) has attracted significant research attention due to its diverse real-world applications. Recently, exploiting transformers for MTSC has achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, existing methods focus on generic features, providing a comprehensive understanding of data, but they ignore class-specific features crucial for learning the representative characteristics of each class. This leads to poor performance in the case of imbalanced datasets or datasets with similar overall patterns but differing in minor class-specific details. In this paper, we propose a novel Shapelet Transformer (ShapeFormer), which comprises class-specific and generic transformer modules to capture both of these features. In the class-specific module, we introduce the discovery method to extract the discriminative subsequences of each class (i.e. shapelets) from the training set. We then propose a Shapelet Filter to learn the difference features between these shapelets and the input time series. We found that the difference feature for each shapelet contains important class-specific features, as it shows a significant distinction between its class and others. In the generic module, convolution filters are used to extract generic features that contain information to distinguish among all classes. For each module, we employ the transformer encoder to capture the correlation between their features. As a result, the combination of two transformer modules allows our model to exploit the power of both types of features, thereby enhancing the classification performance. Our experiments on 30 UEA MTSC datasets demonstrate that ShapeFormer has achieved the highest accuracy ranking compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xuanmay2701/shapeformer.

  • 4 authors
·
May 23, 2024

A Statistics and Deep Learning Hybrid Method for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting and Mortality Modeling

Hybrid methods have been shown to outperform pure statistical and pure deep learning methods at forecasting tasks and quantifying the associated uncertainty with those forecasts (prediction intervals). One example is Exponential Smoothing Recurrent Neural Network (ES-RNN), a hybrid between a statistical forecasting model and a recurrent neural network variant. ES-RNN achieves a 9.4\% improvement in absolute error in the Makridakis-4 Forecasting Competition. This improvement and similar outperformance from other hybrid models have primarily been demonstrated only on univariate datasets. Difficulties with applying hybrid forecast methods to multivariate data include (i) the high computational cost involved in hyperparameter tuning for models that are not parsimonious, (ii) challenges associated with auto-correlation inherent in the data, as well as (iii) complex dependency (cross-correlation) between the covariates that may be hard to capture. This paper presents Multivariate Exponential Smoothing Long Short Term Memory (MES-LSTM), a generalized multivariate extension to ES-RNN, that overcomes these challenges. MES-LSTM utilizes a vectorized implementation. We test MES-LSTM on several aggregated coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) morbidity datasets and find our hybrid approach shows consistent, significant improvement over pure statistical and deep learning methods at forecast accuracy and prediction interval construction.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 15, 2021

Carve3D: Improving Multi-view Reconstruction Consistency for Diffusion Models with RL Finetuning

Recent advancements in the text-to-3D task leverage finetuned text-to-image diffusion models to generate multi-view images, followed by NeRF reconstruction. Yet, existing supervised finetuned (SFT) diffusion models still suffer from multi-view inconsistency and the resulting NeRF artifacts. Although training longer with SFT improves consistency, it also causes distribution shift, which reduces diversity and realistic details. We argue that the SFT of multi-view diffusion models resembles the instruction finetuning stage of the LLM alignment pipeline and can benefit from RL finetuning (RLFT) methods. Essentially, RLFT methods optimize models beyond their SFT data distribution by using their own outputs, effectively mitigating distribution shift. To this end, we introduce Carve3D, a RLFT method coupled with the Multi-view Reconstruction Consistency (MRC) metric, to improve the consistency of multi-view diffusion models. To compute MRC on a set of multi-view images, we compare them with their corresponding renderings of the reconstructed NeRF at the same viewpoints. We validate the robustness of MRC with extensive experiments conducted under controlled inconsistency levels. We enhance the base RLFT algorithm to stabilize the training process, reduce distribution shift, and identify scaling laws. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, along with a user study, we demonstrate Carve3D's improved multi-view consistency, the resulting superior NeRF reconstruction quality, and minimal distribution shift compared to longer SFT. Project webpage: https://desaixie.github.io/carve-3d.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 21, 2023 1

Contributions to Robust and Efficient Methods for Analysis of High Dimensional Data

A ubiquitous feature of data of our era is their extra-large sizes and dimensions. Analyzing such high-dimensional data poses significant challenges, since the feature dimension is often much larger than the sample size. This thesis introduces robust and computationally efficient methods to address several common challenges associated with high-dimensional data. In my first manuscript, I propose a coherent approach to variable screening that accommodates nonlinear associations. I develop a novel variable screening method that transcends traditional linear assumptions by leveraging mutual information, with an intended application in neuroimaging data. This approach allows for accurate identification of important variables by capturing nonlinear as well as linear relationships between the outcome and covariates. Building on this foundation, I develop new optimization methods for sparse estimation using nonconvex penalties in my second manuscript. These methods address notable challenges in current statistical computing practices, facilitating computationally efficient and robust analyses of complex datasets. The proposed method can be applied to a general class of optimization problems. In my third manuscript, I contribute to robust modeling of high-dimensional correlated observations by developing a mixed-effects model based on Tsallis power-law entropy maximization and discussed the theoretical properties of such distribution. This model surpasses the constraints of conventional Gaussian models by accommodating a broader class of distributions with enhanced robustness to outliers. Additionally, I develop a proximal nonlinear conjugate gradient algorithm that accelerates convergence while maintaining numerical stability, along with rigorous statistical properties for the proposed framework.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 9, 2025

Theoretical Foundations of Latent Posterior Factors: Formal Guarantees for Multi-Evidence Reasoning

We present a complete theoretical characterization of Latent Posterior Factors (LPF), a principled framework for aggregating multiple heterogeneous evidence items in probabilistic prediction tasks. Multi-evidence reasoning arises pervasively in high-stakes domains including healthcare diagnosis, financial risk assessment, legal case analysis, and regulatory compliance, yet existing approaches either lack formal guarantees or fail to handle multi-evidence scenarios architecturally. LPF encodes each evidence item into a Gaussian latent posterior via a variational autoencoder, converting posteriors to soft factors through Monte Carlo marginalization, and aggregating factors via exact Sum-Product Network inference (LPF-SPN) or a learned neural aggregator (LPF-Learned). We prove seven formal guarantees spanning the key desiderata for trustworthy AI: Calibration Preservation (ECE <= epsilon + C/sqrt(K_eff)); Monte Carlo Error decaying as O(1/sqrt(M)); a non-vacuous PAC-Bayes bound with train-test gap of 0.0085 at N=4200; operation within 1.12x of the information-theoretic lower bound; graceful degradation as O(epsilon*delta*sqrt(K)) under corruption, maintaining 88% performance with half of evidence adversarially replaced; O(1/sqrt(K)) calibration decay with R^2=0.849; and exact epistemic-aleatoric uncertainty decomposition with error below 0.002%. All theorems are empirically validated on controlled datasets spanning up to 4,200 training examples. Our theoretical framework establishes LPF as a foundation for trustworthy multi-evidence AI in safety-critical applications.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 13 2

Moirai-MoE: Empowering Time Series Foundation Models with Sparse Mixture of Experts

Time series foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance as zero-shot forecasters. However, achieving effectively unified training on time series remains an open challenge. Existing approaches introduce some level of model specialization to account for the highly heterogeneous nature of time series data. For instance, Moirai pursues unified training by employing multiple input/output projection layers, each tailored to handle time series at a specific frequency. Similarly, TimesFM maintains a frequency embedding dictionary for this purpose. We identify two major drawbacks to this human-imposed frequency-level model specialization: (1) Frequency is not a reliable indicator of the underlying patterns in time series. For example, time series with different frequencies can display similar patterns, while those with the same frequency may exhibit varied patterns. (2) Non-stationarity is an inherent property of real-world time series, leading to varied distributions even within a short context window of a single time series. Frequency-level specialization is too coarse-grained to capture this level of diversity. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Moirai-MoE, using a single input/output projection layer while delegating the modeling of diverse time series patterns to the sparse mixture of experts (MoE) within Transformers. With these designs, Moirai-MoE reduces reliance on human-defined heuristics and enables automatic token-level specialization. Extensive experiments on 39 datasets demonstrate the superiority of Moirai-MoE over existing foundation models in both in-distribution and zero-shot scenarios. Furthermore, this study conducts comprehensive model analyses to explore the inner workings of time series MoE foundation models and provides valuable insights for future research.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024

LoFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Long-tailed Semi-Supervised Learning in Open-World Scenarios

Long-tailed semi-supervised learning (LTSSL) presents a formidable challenge where models must overcome the scarcity of tail samples while mitigating the noise from unreliable pseudo-labels. Most prior LTSSL methods are designed to train models from scratch, which often leads to issues such as overconfidence and low-quality pseudo-labels. To address this problem, we first theoretically prove that utilizing a foundation model significantly reduces the hypothesis complexity, which tightens the generalization bound and in turn minimizes the Balanced Posterior Error (BPE). Furthermore, we demonstrate that the feature compactness of foundation models strictly compresses the acceptance region for outliers, providing a geometric guarantee for robustness. Motivated by these theoretical insights, we extend LTSSL into the foundation model fine-tuning paradigm and propose a novel framework: LoFT (Long-tailed semi-supervised learning via parameter-efficient Fine-Tuning). Furthermore, we explore a more practical setting by investigating semi-supervised learning under open-world conditions, where the unlabeled data may include out-of-distribution (OOD) samples.To handle this problem, we propose LoFT-OW (LoFT under Open-World scenarios) to improve the discriminative ability. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance. Code is available: https://github.com/games-liker/LoFT

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 7 2

Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysis

Time series data are ubiquitous across a wide range of real-world domains. While real-world time series analysis (TSA) requires human experts to integrate numerical series data with multimodal domain-specific knowledge, most existing TSA models rely solely on numerical data, overlooking the significance of information beyond numerical series. This oversight is due to the untapped potential of textual series data and the absence of a comprehensive, high-quality multimodal dataset. To overcome this obstacle, we introduce Time-MMD, the first multi-domain, multimodal time series dataset covering 9 primary data domains. Time-MMD ensures fine-grained modality alignment, eliminates data contamination, and provides high usability. Additionally, we develop MM-TSFlib, the first multimodal time-series forecasting (TSF) library, seamlessly pipelining multimodal TSF evaluations based on Time-MMD for in-depth analyses. Extensive experiments conducted on Time-MMD through MM-TSFlib demonstrate significant performance enhancements by extending unimodal TSF to multimodality, evidenced by over 15% mean squared error reduction in general, and up to 40% in domains with rich textual data. More importantly, our datasets and library revolutionize broader applications, impacts, research topics to advance TSA. The dataset and library are available at https://github.com/AdityaLab/Time-MMD and https://github.com/AdityaLab/MM-TSFlib.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 12, 2024

Tuning Pre-trained Model via Moment Probing

Recently, efficient fine-tuning of large-scale pre-trained models has attracted increasing research interests, where linear probing (LP) as a fundamental module is involved in exploiting the final representations for task-dependent classification. However, most of the existing methods focus on how to effectively introduce a few of learnable parameters, and little work pays attention to the commonly used LP module. In this paper, we propose a novel Moment Probing (MP) method to further explore the potential of LP. Distinguished from LP which builds a linear classification head based on the mean of final features (e.g., word tokens for ViT) or classification tokens, our MP performs a linear classifier on feature distribution, which provides the stronger representation ability by exploiting richer statistical information inherent in features. Specifically, we represent feature distribution by its characteristic function, which is efficiently approximated by using first- and second-order moments of features. Furthermore, we propose a multi-head convolutional cross-covariance (MHC^3) to compute second-order moments in an efficient and effective manner. By considering that MP could affect feature learning, we introduce a partially shared module to learn two recalibrating parameters (PSRP) for backbones based on MP, namely MP_{+}. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks using various models show that our MP significantly outperforms LP and is competitive with counterparts at less training cost, while our MP_{+} achieves state-of-the-art performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 21, 2023

VisionTS++: Cross-Modal Time Series Foundation Model with Continual Pre-trained Vision Backbones

Recent studies have indicated that vision models pre-trained on images can serve as time series foundation models (TSFMs) by reformulating time series forecasting (TSF) as image reconstruction. However, effective cross-modal transfer from vision to time series remains challenging due to three discrepancies: (1) the data-modality gap between structured, bounded image data and unbounded, heterogeneous time series; (2) the multivariate-forecasting gap between fixed RGB-three-channel vision models and time series with arbitrary numbers of variates; and (3) the probabilistic-forecasting gap between the deterministic outputs of vision models and the requirement for uncertainty-aware probabilistic predictions. To bridge these gaps, we propose VisonTS++, a TSFM based on continual pre-training of a vision model on large-scale time series. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) vision-model-based filtering to identify high-quality sequences to stabilize pre-training and mitigate modality gap; (2) colorized multivariate conversion, encoding multivariate series as multi-subfigure RGB images to enhance cross-variate modeling; (3) multi-quantile forecasting, using parallel reconstruction heads to generate quantile forecasts without parametric assumptions. Experiments show that VisionTS++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution forecasting, outperforming specialized TSFMs by 6%-44% in MSE reduction and ranking first in GIFT-Eval benchmark which comprises 23 datasets across 7 domains. Our work demonstrates that with appropriate adaptation, vision models can effectively generalize to TSF, thus advancing the pursuit of universal TSFMs. Code is available at https://github.com/HALF111/VisionTSpp.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting

The recent boom of linear forecasting models questions the ongoing passion for architectural modifications of Transformer-based forecasters. These forecasters leverage Transformers to model the global dependencies over temporal tokens of time series, with each token formed by multiple variates of the same timestamp. However, Transformers are challenged in forecasting series with larger lookback windows due to performance degradation and computation explosion. Besides, the embedding for each temporal token fuses multiple variates that represent potential delayed events and distinct physical measurements, which may fail in learning variate-centric representations and result in meaningless attention maps. In this work, we reflect on the competent duties of Transformer components and repurpose the Transformer architecture without any modification to the basic components. We propose iTransformer that simply applies the attention and feed-forward network on the inverted dimensions. Specifically, the time points of individual series are embedded into variate tokens which are utilized by the attention mechanism to capture multivariate correlations; meanwhile, the feed-forward network is applied for each variate token to learn nonlinear representations. The iTransformer model achieves state-of-the-art on challenging real-world datasets, which further empowers the Transformer family with promoted performance, generalization ability across different variates, and better utilization of arbitrary lookback windows, making it a nice alternative as the fundamental backbone of time series forecasting. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/iTransformer.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 10, 2023

SpikF-GO: Spiking Fourier Graph Operators for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks, demonstrating strong performance in computer vision and robotics. More recently, SNNs have been applied to time series forecasting (TSF), with methods exploring spiking temporal backbones, spike-compatible positional encodings, Fourier-domain processing, and redesigned neuron dynamics. However, existing SNN forecasting approaches process variables independently, lacking explicit mechanisms for modeling inter-variable dependencies. This is a critical limitation in multivariate settings, where cross-variable correlations carry substantial predictive information. We propose Spiking Fourier Graph Operators (SpikF-GO), which addresses this gap by combining a hypervariate graph formulation in which every scalar observation becomes a graph node with spike-driven spectral processing. SpikF-GO introduces a Hard Concrete frequency gate for learnable sparse frequency selection and a Complex LIF gate that applies independent spiking neurons to real and imaginary Fourier components, preserving binary, event-driven computation throughout the spectral domain. We further present a variant incorporating Central Pattern Generator-based positional encodings for stronger long-range temporal modeling. Evaluated on eight benchmarks under a unified experimental protocol, SpikF-GO achieves the best average rank among all SNN methods and outperforms its ANN counterpart, FourierGNN, at reduced energy cost. SpikF-GO maintains competitive accuracy even at substantially smaller embedding dimensions, thereby achieving significant energy reductions. To our knowledge, this is among the first works to bring graph-based multivariate modeling into the spiking domain for TSF and the first to provide a unified comparison across SNN forecasting architectures under a common experimental protocol.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 10

Temporal Spatial Decomposition and Fusion Network for Time Series Forecasting

Feature engineering is required to obtain better results for time series forecasting, and decomposition is a crucial one. One decomposition approach often cannot be used for numerous forecasting tasks since the standard time series decomposition lacks flexibility and robustness. Traditional feature selection relies heavily on preexisting domain knowledge, has no generic methodology, and requires a lot of labor. However, most time series prediction models based on deep learning typically suffer from interpretability issue, so the "black box" results lead to a lack of confidence. To deal with the above issues forms the motivation of the thesis. In the paper we propose TSDFNet as a neural network with self-decomposition mechanism and an attentive feature fusion mechanism, It abandons feature engineering as a preprocessing convention and creatively integrates it as an internal module with the deep model. The self-decomposition mechanism empowers TSDFNet with extensible and adaptive decomposition capabilities for any time series, users can choose their own basis functions to decompose the sequence into temporal and generalized spatial dimensions. Attentive feature fusion mechanism has the ability to capture the importance of external variables and the causality with target variables. It can automatically suppress the unimportant features while enhancing the effective ones, so that users do not have to struggle with feature selection. Moreover, TSDFNet is easy to look into the "black box" of the deep neural network by feature visualization and analyze the prediction results. We demonstrate performance improvements over existing widely accepted models on more than a dozen datasets, and three experiments showcase the interpretability of TSDFNet.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 5, 2022

X^2-DFD: A framework for e{X}plainable and e{X}tendable Deepfake Detection

Detecting deepfakes has become an important task. Most existing detection methods provide only real/fake predictions without offering human-comprehensible explanations. Recent studies leveraging MLLMs for deepfake detection have shown improvements in explainability. However, the performance of pre-trained MLLMs (e.g., LLaVA) remains limited due to a lack of understanding of their capabilities for this task and strategies to enhance them. In this work, we empirically assess the strengths and weaknesses of MLLMs specifically in deepfake detection via forgery features analysis. Building on these assessments, we propose a novel framework called {X}^2-DFD, consisting of three core modules. The first module, Model Feature Assessment (MFA), measures the detection capabilities of forgery features intrinsic to MLLMs, and gives a descending ranking of these features. The second module, Strong Feature Strengthening (SFS), enhances the detection and explanation capabilities by fine-tuning the MLLM on a dataset constructed based on the top-ranked features. The third module, Weak Feature Supplementing (WFS), improves the fine-tuned MLLM's capabilities on lower-ranked features by integrating external dedicated deepfake detectors. To verify the effectiveness of this framework, we further present a practical implementation, where an automated forgery features generation, evaluation, and ranking procedure is designed for MFA module; an automated generation procedure of the fine-tuning dataset containing real and fake images with explanations based on top-ranked features is developed for SFS model; an external conventional deepfake detector focusing on blending artifact, which corresponds to a low detection capability in the pre-trained MLLM, is integrated for WFS module. Experiments show that our approach enhances both detection and explanation performance.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 8, 2024

Investigating Compositional Reasoning in Time Series Foundation Models

Large pre-trained time series foundation models (TSFMs) have demonstrated promising zero-shot performance across a wide range of domains. However, a question remains: Do TSFMs succeed solely by memorizing training patterns, or do they possess the ability to reason? While reasoning is a topic of great interest in the study of Large Language Models (LLMs), it is undefined and largely unexplored in the context of TSFMs. In this work, inspired by language modeling literature, we formally define compositional reasoning in forecasting and distinguish it from in-distribution generalization. We evaluate the reasoning and generalization capabilities of 23 popular deep learning forecasting models on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets. Additionally, through controlled studies, we systematically examine which design choices in TSFMs contribute to improved reasoning abilities. Our study yields key insights into the impact of TSFM architecture design on compositional reasoning and generalization. We find that patch-based Transformers have the best reasoning performance, closely followed by residualized MLP-based architectures, which are 97\% less computationally complex in terms of FLOPs and 86\% smaller in terms of the number of trainable parameters. Interestingly, in some zero-shot out-of-distribution scenarios, these models can outperform moving average and exponential smoothing statistical baselines trained on in-distribution data. Only a few design choices, such as the tokenization method, had a significant (negative) impact on Transformer model performance.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 9, 2025

On Creating a Causally Grounded Usable Rating Method for Assessing the Robustness of Foundation Models Supporting Time Series

Foundation Models (FMs) have improved time series forecasting in various sectors, such as finance, but their vulnerability to input disturbances can hinder their adoption by stakeholders, such as investors and analysts. To address this, we propose a causally grounded rating framework to study the robustness of Foundational Models for Time Series (FMTS) with respect to input perturbations. We evaluate our approach to the stock price prediction problem, a well-studied problem with easily accessible public data, evaluating six state-of-the-art (some multi-modal) FMTS across six prominent stocks spanning three industries. The ratings proposed by our framework effectively assess the robustness of FMTS and also offer actionable insights for model selection and deployment. Within the scope of our study, we find that (1) multi-modal FMTS exhibit better robustness and accuracy compared to their uni-modal versions and, (2) FMTS pre-trained on time series forecasting task exhibit better robustness and forecasting accuracy compared to general-purpose FMTS pre-trained across diverse settings. Further, to validate our framework's usability, we conduct a user study showcasing FMTS prediction errors along with our computed ratings. The study confirmed that our ratings reduced the difficulty for users in comparing the robustness of different systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 17, 2025

Met^2Net: A Decoupled Two-Stage Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Model for Complex Meteorological Systems

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to global climate change urges accurate weather prediction. Recently, great advances have been made by the end-to-end methods, thanks to deep learning techniques, but they face limitations of representation inconsistency in multivariable integration and struggle to effectively capture the dependency between variables, which is required in complex weather systems. Treating different variables as distinct modalities and applying a two-stage training approach from multimodal models can partially alleviate this issue, but due to the inconformity in training tasks between the two stages, the results are often suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose an implicit two-stage training method, configuring separate encoders and decoders for each variable. In detailed, in the first stage, the Translator is frozen while the Encoders and Decoders learn a shared latent space, in the second stage, the Encoders and Decoders are frozen, and the Translator captures inter-variable interactions for prediction. Besides, by introducing a self-attention mechanism for multivariable fusion in the latent space, the performance achieves further improvements. Empirically, extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Specifically, it reduces the MSE for near-surface air temperature and relative humidity predictions by 28.82\% and 23.39\%, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/ShremG/Met2Net.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025 1

FedLoGe: Joint Local and Generic Federated Learning under Long-tailed Data

Federated Long-Tailed Learning (Fed-LT), a paradigm wherein data collected from decentralized local clients manifests a globally prevalent long-tailed distribution, has garnered considerable attention in recent times. In the context of Fed-LT, existing works have predominantly centered on addressing the data imbalance issue to enhance the efficacy of the generic global model while neglecting the performance at the local level. In contrast, conventional Personalized Federated Learning (pFL) techniques are primarily devised to optimize personalized local models under the presumption of a balanced global data distribution. This paper introduces an approach termed Federated Local and Generic Model Training in Fed-LT (FedLoGe), which enhances both local and generic model performance through the integration of representation learning and classifier alignment within a neural collapse framework. Our investigation reveals the feasibility of employing a shared backbone as a foundational framework for capturing overarching global trends, while concurrently employing individualized classifiers to encapsulate distinct refinements stemming from each client's local features. Building upon this discovery, we establish the Static Sparse Equiangular Tight Frame Classifier (SSE-C), inspired by neural collapse principles that naturally prune extraneous noisy features and foster the acquisition of potent data representations. Furthermore, leveraging insights from imbalance neural collapse's classifier norm patterns, we develop Global and Local Adaptive Feature Realignment (GLA-FR) via an auxiliary global classifier and personalized Euclidean norm transfer to align global features with client preferences. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR-10/100-LT, ImageNet, and iNaturalist demonstrate the advantage of our method over state-of-the-art pFL and Fed-LT approaches.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

Adaptive Fusion of Multi-view Remote Sensing data for Optimal Sub-field Crop Yield Prediction

Accurate crop yield prediction is of utmost importance for informed decision-making in agriculture, aiding farmers, and industry stakeholders. However, this task is complex and depends on multiple factors, such as environmental conditions, soil properties, and management practices. Combining heterogeneous data views poses a fusion challenge, like identifying the view-specific contribution to the predictive task. We present a novel multi-view learning approach to predict crop yield for different crops (soybean, wheat, rapeseed) and regions (Argentina, Uruguay, and Germany). Our multi-view input data includes multi-spectral optical images from Sentinel-2 satellites and weather data as dynamic features during the crop growing season, complemented by static features like soil properties and topographic information. To effectively fuse the data, we introduce a Multi-view Gated Fusion (MVGF) model, comprising dedicated view-encoders and a Gated Unit (GU) module. The view-encoders handle the heterogeneity of data sources with varying temporal resolutions by learning a view-specific representation. These representations are adaptively fused via a weighted sum. The fusion weights are computed for each sample by the GU using a concatenation of the view-representations. The MVGF model is trained at sub-field level with 10 m resolution pixels. Our evaluations show that the MVGF outperforms conventional models on the same task, achieving the best results by incorporating all the data sources, unlike the usual fusion results in the literature. For Argentina, the MVGF model achieves an R2 value of 0.68 at sub-field yield prediction, while at field level evaluation (comparing field averages), it reaches around 0.80 across different countries. The GU module learned different weights based on the country and crop-type, aligning with the variable significance of each data source to the prediction task.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 22, 2024