Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) have achieved strong univariate forecasting through large-scale pre-training, yet effectively extending this success to multivariate forecasting remains challenging. To address this, we propose DualWeaver, a novel framework that adapts univariate TSFMs (Uni-TSFMs) for multivariate forecasting by using a pair of learnable, structurally symmetric surrogate series. Generated by a shared auxiliary feature-fusion module that captures cross-variable dependencies, these surrogates are mapped to TSFM-compatible series via the forecasting objective. The symmetric structure enables parameter-free reconstruction of final predictions directly from the surrogates, without additional parametric decoding. A theoretically grounded regularization term is further introduced to enhance robustness against adaptation collapse. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets show that DualWeaver outperforms state-of-the-art multivariate forecasters in both accuracy and stability. We release the code at https://github.com/li-jinpeng/DualWeaver.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: The paradigms adapting Uni-TSFM for multivariate forecasting. (a) Channel-independent: each variable is processed separately by Uni-TSFMs, ignoring cross-variable dependencies. (b) Encoder-Decoder: an encoder maps original variables to latent representations, whose predictions are then decoded back; the decoding may mislead the adaptation. (c) Dual-tuned Surrogates (ours): a shared feature-fusion module generates dual surrogates that capture dependencies under distinct optimization directions, reducing overfitting and making adaptation more robust.
Figure 2: The overview of the DualWeaver framework. A shared feature-fusion module first extracts cross-variable dependencies to generate a pair of dual-tuned surrogates ( Sα , Sβ ). These surrogates are independently processed by a frozen Uni-TSFM, after which the final multivariate predictions are derived via non-parametric reconstruction to neutralize the shared fusion part.
Methods
DualWeaver
AdaPTS
SFT
Vanilla
TimePro
SimpleTM
TimeMixer
iTrans.
(Ours)
(2025)
(2025)
(2025)
(2024)
(2024c)
Metric
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
TimerXL
ETTh1
0.406
0.419
0.411
0.433
0.427
0.428
0.419
0.427
0.438
0.438
0.422
0.428
0.458
0.445
0.454
0.447
ETTh2
0.340
0.386
0.348
0.399
0.349
0.389
0.359
0.396
0.377
0.403
0.353
0.391
0.384
0.407
0.383
0.407
ETTm1
0.338
0.379
0.347
0.392
0.377
0.390
0.397
0.409
0.391
0.400
0.381
0.396
0.385
0.399
0.407
0.410
ETTm2
0.260
0.318
0.268
0.336
0.261
0.320
0.288
0.347
0.281
0.326
0.275
0.322
0.278
0.325
0.288
0.332
Table 1: Multivariate forecasting results on public datasets with forecasting horizons ∈{96,192,336,720} . Averaged results are reported here, and full results are provided in Table 10 with the best in bold and the second underlined . 1st Count represents the number of wins achieved by a method under all prediction lengths and datasets. Results for TimePro, SimpleTM, TimeMixer, and iTransformers are reported in ( Ma et al., 2025 ) and ( Chen et al., 2025 ) . Extended evaluations on additional datasets are provided in Appendix D .
Figure 3: Performance comparison between Sundial (128M) and Chronos-2 (119M). While Chronos-2 benefits from cross-variable interactions in certain scenarios, DualWeaver enables the adapted Sundial to approach or exceed such performance.
Figure 4: Predictive stability under increasing noise. DualWeaver remains robust to additional noise, outperforming baselines that degrade progressively. Done with forecasting horizon at 96.
Figure 5: Predictability enhancement in the surrogate space. DualWeaver transforms complex multivariate signals into predictable surrogates, yielding an average reduction of 85.44% in MSE and 61.58% in MAE compared to the original input space.
Figure 6: Training efficiency and scalability comparison by training time per epoch (s) and peak memory consumption (GB) on the ETTh1 dataset using TimerXL. While AdaPTS exhibits linear growth in computational costs, DualWeaver maintains a near-constant resource footprint across varying hidden dimensions.
Figure 7: Impact of the regularization on training stability. Without the theoretical constraint (Eq. 13 ), the model experiences catastrophic divergence after epoch 10, with validation error increasing by four orders of magnitude. Using our proposed regularization ensures consistent stability and performance.
Figure 8: Dimensionality Scalability on ECL Dataset. Comparison of performance gains (MSE reduction) achieved by DualWeaver and AdaPTS on TimerXL as the number of variables N increases. While AdaPTS exhibits sensitivity to increasing dimensionality with declining returns, DualWeaver demonstrates superior robustness and stable predictive gains even as N reaches 321.
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Dataset
Dim
Dataset Size
Frequency
ETTh1
7
(8545, 2881, 2881)
Hourly
ETTh2
7
(8545, 2881, 2881)
Hourly
ETTm1
7
(34465, 11521, 11521)
15min
ETTm2
7
(34465, 11521, 11521)
15min
Weather
21
(36792, 5271, 10540)
10min
ECL
321
(18317, 2633, 5261)
Hourly
Appendix
Table 3: Detailed dataset descriptions.
Methods
DualWeaver
AdaPTS
Vanilla
Metric
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
TimerXL
ETTh1
0.409
0.418
0.407
0.429
0.419
0.427
ETTh2
0.341
0.386
0.344
0.397
0.359
0.396
ETTm1
0.368
0.397
0.360
0.400
0.397
0.409
ETTm2
0.276
0.335
0.273
0.344
0.288
0.347
Weather
0.245
0.289
0.244
0.304
0.255
0.302
Appendix
Table 4: Multivariate forecasting results on vanilla Uni-TSFMs with forecasting horizons ∈{96,192,336,720} . Averaged results are reported here with the best in bold .
Methods
WeaverCNN
AdaPTS
Vanilla
Metric
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
TimerXL
ETTh1
0.406
0.419
0.411
0.433
0.419
0.427
ETTh2
0.342
0.386
0.348
0.39
0.359
0.396
ETTm1
0.336
0.388
0.347
0.392
0.397
0.409
ETTm2
0.260
0.318
0.268
0.336
0.288
0.347
Weather
0.228
0.273
0.227
0.284
0.255
0.302
Appendix
Table 5: Multivariate forecasting results of CNN-variant DualWeaver with forecasting horizons ∈{96,192,336,720} . Averaged results are reported here with the best in bold .
Table 7: Multivariate forecasting on additional datasets with forecasting horizons ∈{24,36,48,60} for Exchange and ∈{96,192,336,720} for others. Averaged results are reported here with the best in bold .
Table 9: Cross-variable correlation decay under synthetic noise injection.
Figure 9: Heatmap for Cross-Time Cross-Variate Correlation Coefficient of ETTm2 and Weather. The color intensity (brightness) within the heatmaps directly maps to the absolute magnitude of the Cross-Time Cross-Variate Correlation Coefficient. Bright regions (represented by lighter yellow) indicate “correlation hotspots” where the coefficient approaches 0.8, signifying potent synchronous or asynchronous dependencies between the specific variable patches. Conversely, dark regions (represented by deep purple) denote “null zones” where the correlation is near zero, indicating that the variables evolve independently without identifiable inter-series relationships in those temporal windows.
Figure 10: Comparison of gradient dynamics and training stability. We visualize the L2 norm of weight gradient differences between consecutive steps ( ∇Wt+1−∇Wt ) for the fully-connected layers of the feature-fusion module. DualWeaver maintains a remarkably smooth, consistent gradient transition, underscoring the superior numerical stability of our dual-surrogate optimization framework.
Methods
DualWeaver
AdaPTS
SFT
Vanilla
TimePro
SimpleTM
TimeMixer
iTrans.
(Ours)
(2025)
(2025)
(2025)
(2024)
(2024)
Metirc
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
ETTh1
96
0.352
0.380
0.351
0.387
0.360
0.384
0.366
0.392
0.375
0.398
0.366
0.392
0.381
0.401
0.386
0.405
192
0.401
0.410
0.401
0.421
0.411
0.415
0.415
0.419
0.427
0.429
0.422
0.421
0.440
0.433
0.441
0.436
336
0.434
0.431
0.437
0.445
0.452
0.438
0.450
0.439
0.472
0.450
0.440
0.438
0.501
0.462
0.487
0.458
720
0.437
0.456
0.456
0.479
0.486
0.474
0.446
0.457
0.476
0.474
0.463
0.462
0.501
0.482
0.503
0.491
Appendix
Table 10: Multivariate forecasting results on public datasets with forecasting horizons ∈{96,192,336,720} .
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.
Patrick Podest, Marco Pichler, Elias Bürger +7
ELLIS Unit Linz, LIT AI Lab & Institute for Machine Learning, JKU Linz, Austria · NXAI Lab, Linz, Austria · NXAI GmbH, Linz, Austria +1
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 excellent forecasting performance, offering a principled and scalable paradigm for complex multivariate environments. Falcon-X is publicly released to support future research.
We introduce Timer-M1, a pretrained multivariate time series foundation model that learns with primitives for zero-shot forecasting. Across domains, time series share elementary temporal and relational patterns, termed primitives, yet differ in how these primitives manifest and evolve across different contexts. Despite progress in zero-shot and task-general forecasting, existing foundation models may still struggle to generalize to complex real-world scenarios. To this end, we develop a primitive-based data synthesis and pretraining pipeline. The synthesis pipeline generates series with temporal primitives shared across domains and then assembles real and generated series into multivariate samples using relational primitives. Afterwards, samples are organized into episodes by assigning distinct channel roles as target variates, past-only covariates, and known-future covariates, ensuring that the model is optimized on predictable variates using available exogenous information. Technically, Timer-M1 further adapts gated two-dimensional Transformer blocks that dynamically allocate cross-variate attention across layers. Across three large-scale forecasting benchmarks, Timer-M1 ranks first on both FEV and TIME and second on GIFT-Eval among most recent time series foundation models. These results support effective primitive-based pretraining as a route to robust general forecasting technique across domains and task settings.
Haoran Zhang, Haixuan Liu, Xingjian Su +5
School of Software, BNRist, Tsinghua University · ByteDance, Beijing, China