Aura: Universal Multi-dimensional Exogenous Integration for Aviation Time Series
Authors: Jiafeng Lin, Mengren Zheng, Simeng Ye, Yuxuan Wang, Huan Zhang, Yuhui Liu, Zhongyi Pei, Jianmin Wang
Organizations: School of Software, BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Hongshen College, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China · School of Software, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · China Southern Airlines, Guangzhou, China
Time series forecasting has witnessed an increasing demand across diverse industrial applications, where accurate predictions are pivotal for informed decision-making. Beyond numerical time series data, reliable forecasting in practical scenarios requires integrating diverse exogenous factors. Such exogenous information is often multi-dimensional or even multimodal, introducing heterogeneous interactions that unimodal time series models struggle to capture. In this paper, we delve into an aviation maintenance scenario and identify three distinct types of exogenous factors that influence temporal dynamics through distinct interaction modes. Based on this empirical insight, we propose Aura, a universal framework that explicitly organizes and encodes heterogeneous external information according to its interaction mode with the target time series. Specifically, Aura utilizes a tailored tripartite encoding mechanism to embed heterogeneous features into well-established time series models, ensuring seamless integration of non-sequential context. Extensive experiments on a large-scale, three-year industrial dataset from China Southern Airlines, covering the Boeing 777 and Airbus A320 fleets, demonstrate that Aura consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across all baselines and exhibits superior adaptability. Our findings highlight Aura's potential as a general-purpose enhancement for aviation safety and reliability.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Illustration of diverse exogenous information influencing aircraft component anomaly detection. Beyond the time series directly associated with the equipment, this detection process incorporates multiple factors, including correlated sensor signals, aircraft register, airport location, and dynamic environmental takeoff conditions, which collectively influence the temporal dynamics, necessitating a unified integration for accurate health monitoring.
Figure 2. Bleed Air System Schematic.
Figure 3. Overall architecture of Aura, a multi-dimensional exogenous integration framework. Aura integrates static attributes encoded by LLMs and geospatial embeddings, and prepends them to endogenous tokens. Two cross-attention layers fuse exogenous series via residual connections to regulate the strength of integration. A Mixture of Experts (MoE) module leverages LLM-generated future insights from dynamic events to guide time series forecasting.
Model
Aura
DUET
CrossLinear
Timer-XL
TimeXer
TiDE
TimeLLM
GPT4TS
iTransformer
DLinear
PatchTST
TimesNet
Autoformer
LightGBM
(Ours)
( ( 2025a ) )
( ( 2025 ) )
( ( 2024c ) )
( ( 2024c ) )
( ( 2023 ) )
( ( 2023 ) )
( ( 2023 ) )
( ( 2023 ) )
( ( 2023 ) )
( ( 2022 ) )
( ( 2022 ) )
( ( 2021 ) )
( ( 2017 ) )
Boeing
MSE ↓
0.075
0.157
0.109
0.140
0.093
0.318
0.358
0.158
0.086
0.203
0.122
0.113
0.823
0.145
777
MAE ↓
0.180
0.250
0.225
0.232
0.197
0.401
0.427
0.240
0.184
0.286
0.224
0.208
0.711
0.220
Left
TAR ↑
0.625
0.500
0.500
0.500
0.500
0.375
0.375
0.500
0.500
0.500
0.500
0.500
0.375
0.500
Boeing
MSE ↓
0.086
0.103
0.117
0.118
0.101
0.308
0.413
0.100
0.090
0.170
0.107
0.106
0.668
0.096
777
MAE ↓
0.182
0.202
0.230
0.213
0.201
0.396
0.466
0.189
0.189
0.262
0.207
0.199
0.636
0.182
Table 1. Results of time series forecasting and anomaly detection on China Southern Airlines datasets. Bold indicates the best performance. True Alert Rates (TAR) are calculated under a constrained false alarm rate of 5% to ensure practical reliability.
Model
Aura
iTransformer
TimeXer
TimerXL
TiDE
CrossLinear
DUET
PatchTST
TimesNet
DLinear
Autoformer
Metric
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
MSE
MAE
BE
0.338
0.239
0.356
0.250
0.367
0.231
0.608
0.413
0.411
0.288
0.417
0.269
0.463
0.333
0.434
0.336
0.481
0.351
0.392
0.280
0.829
0.549
DE
0.266
0.322
0.268
0.324
0.301
0.328
0.921
0.633
0.392
0.399
0.429
0.416
0.336
0.351
0.302
0.323
0.291
0.333
0.375
0.387
1.080
0.695
FR
0.346
0.187
0.371
0.205
0.361
0.197
0.573
0.350
0.457
0.299
0.409
0.244
0.420
0.238
0.420
0.219
0.408
0.236
0.411
0.273
0.763
0.480
NP
0.183
0.227
0.200
0.253
0.197
0.241
1.194
0.799
0.252
0.287
0.549
0.554
0.313
0.367
0.466
0.478
0.231
0.296
0.237
0.273
0.819
0.657
PJM
0.069
0.165
0.078
0.166
0.082
0.179
0.339
0.323
0.098
0.215
0.098
0.193
0.080
0.176
0.109
0.167
0.103
0.177
0.091
0.206
0.334
0.441
Table 2. Exogenous forecasting results on the EPF benchmark with future exogenous series. We set the input length to 168 and the prediction length to 24, following TimeXer ( Wang et al., 2024c ) experimental setup. AVG means the average results from all five datasets.
Figure 4. Statistical distribution of gated weights for history and future exogenous series.
Design
Boeing 777 Left
Boeing 777 Right
Airbus A320 Left
Airbus A320 Right
MSE
MAE
TAR
MSE
MAE
TAR
MSE
MAE
TAR
MSE
MAE
TAR
Aura
0.075
0.180
0.625
0.086
0.182
0.625
0.048
0.138
0.345
0.063
0.146
0.414
Data
w/o Static Attributes
0.107
0.213
0.500
0.094
0.200
0.625
0.050
0.141
0.345
0.152
0.152
0.310
w/o Dynamic Events
0.085
0.190
0.500
0.096
0.209
0.625
0.050
0.139
0.345
0.064
0.147
0.310
w/o Exogenous Series
0.542
0.528
0.375
0.422
0.451
0.500
0.055
0.145
0.276
0.068
0.154
0.241
Arch
Token Concat
0.094
0.196
0.500
0.094
0.194
0.625
0.054
0.142
0.276
0.064
0.149
0.310
Table 3. Ablation Results on the design of Aura. Data refers to the removal of three distinct types of exogenous information. Arch represents architectural modifications, where the first three experiments employ uniform modeling for all exogenous information, and the final experiment evaluates the removal of the gated residual module.
Figure 5. Deployed model inference visualization within the health monitoring system of China Southern Airlines.
Multivariate time series forecasting plays a critical role in real-world applications, including weather prediction, stock analysis, and health monitoring. Due to the diversity of data sources, time series exhibit diverse temporal dynamics, often accompanied by various irregularities such as missing values and non-uniform sampling frequencies. Such irregularities lead to complex and asynchronous temporal dependencies across channels. Thus, a single model with a fixed patching scheme often fails to adapt well to diverse multivariate time series, hindering accurate forecasting. In this paper, we propose TiWeaver, a unified framework designed to handle temporal dynamics and fine-grained inter-channel dependencies adaptively. Specifically, we introduce a Graph-Guided Adaptive Tokenizer (G2AT) that divides time series into high contextually coherent patches by jointly considering temporal density and representation consistency. In addition, we propose a Fine-grained Asynchronous Dependency Extractor (FADE), which is designed to model fine-grained asynchronous inter-channel dependencies while incorporating long-term historical dependencies. We evaluate TiWeaver on 12 real-world time series datasets, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods up to 25%. These results demonstrate its robustness and effectiveness across diverse domains and data characteristics.
Zhe Li, Jindong Tian, Hao Miao +3
East China Normal University Shanghai, China · Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong, China · Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) enable cross-domain forecasting, but their development as general-purpose forecasters remains constrained by underexplored training potential and limited architectural versatility. To address these challenges, we introduce Aurora-X, a billion-scale TSFM with a progressive curriculum and a unified architecture. We first use channel-independent pretraining to learn temporal patterns, then introduce cross-variable dependencies, varied context and horizon lengths, and future covariates if available during midtraining. Variable-resolution post-training further enables an adjustable temporal span per token at inference. With fixed model weights, this supports longer histories under a fixed token budget or fewer tokens for the same history, enabling test-time scaling. With a versatile architecture, Aurora-X supports cross-variable modeling, covariate conditioning, and parallel decoding of future patches for probabilistic forecasting. These are supported by a novel pattern-guided mixture-of-experts that expands model capacity through sparse activation and uses shallow patch similarities to constrain deep-layer routing, guiding expert specialization across heterogeneous time series. Furthermore, we propose an implicit quantile network head that predicts arbitrary quantiles to characterize predictive distributions, enhancing probabilistic forecasting flexibility. Comprehensive experiments on GIFT-Eval, TIME, FEV-Bench, TFB, and DAG-Bench demonstrate state-of-the-art forecasting performance against pretrained TSFMs and task-specific supervised models.
Multivariate time series forecasting is widely applied in fields such as transportation, energy, and finance. However, the data commonly suffers from issues of multi-scale characteristics, weak correlations, and noise interference, which limit the predictive performance of existing models. This paper proposes a dual-stream sparse Mixer prediction framework that extracts global trends and local dynamic features from sequences in both the frequency and time domains, respectively. It employs a sparsity mechanism to filter out invalid information, thereby enhancing the accuracy of cross-variable dependency modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves leading performance on multiple real-world scenario datasets, validating its effectiveness and generality. The code is available at https://github.com/SDMixer/SDMixer
Xiang Ao
School of Software Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China