Organizations: ADAPT SFI Research Centre, School of Computer Science, Technological University Dublin, Ireland · ADAPT SFI Research Centre, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin · School of Computer Science, Technological University Dublin, Ireland
Accurate forecasting of air pollution is important for environmental monitoring and policy support, yet data-driven models often suffer from limited generalization in regions with sparse observations. This paper presents Meteorology-Driven GPT for Air Pollution (GPT4AP), a parameter-efficient multi-task forecasting framework based on a pre-trained GPT-2 backbone and Gaussian rank-stabilized low-rank adaptation (rsLoRA). The model freezes the self-attention and feed-forward layers and adapts lightweight positional and output modules, substantially reducing the number of trainable parameters. GPT4AP is evaluated on six real-world air quality monitoring datasets under few-shot, zero-shot, and long-term forecasting settings. In the few-shot regime using 10% of the training data, GPT4AP achieves an average MSE/MAE of 0.686/0.442, outperforming DLinear (0.728/0.530) and ETSformer (0.734/0.505). In zero-shot cross-station transfer, the proposed model attains an average MSE/MAE of 0.529/0.403, demonstrating improved generalization compared with existing baselines. In long-term forecasting with full training data, GPT4AP remains competitive, achieving an average MAE of 0.429, while specialized time-series models show slightly lower errors. These results indicate that GPT4AP provides a data-efficient forecasting approach that performs robustly under limited supervision and domain shift, while maintaining competitive accuracy in data-rich settings.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of GPT4AP. Multivariate air-pollution and meteorological time series are embedded and projected into temporal tokens. Trainable positional encoding is added before feeding tokens into a frozen GPT-2 backbone. Parameter-efficient Gaussian rsLoRA is applied to lightweight adaptation modules, while the pretrained transformer weights remain frozen. A prediction head produces outputs for few-shot, long-term, and zero-shot forecasting across multiple horizons.
Hyperparameter
Value
Backbone
GPT-2 (pre-trained)
Fine-tuning method
rsLoRA
rsLoRA initialization
Gaussian
Optimizer
Adam
Rank
32
Learning rate
1×10−4
TABLE I: Hyperparameter settings for GPT4AP.
Dataset
Horizon
GPT4AP
DLinear
ETSformer
FiLM
Informer
Pyraformer
Transformer
AZ
24
0.546/0.338
0.628/0.491
0.589/0.440
0.657/0.442
0.853/0.592
0.724/0.544
0.766/0.556
36
0.633/0.431
0.692/0.525
0.685/0.492
0.701/0.466
1.147/0.742
0.824/0.585
0.874/0.615
48
0.686/0.457
0.724/0.543
0.756/0.528
0.747/0.486
1.014/0.718
0.930/0.642
0.938/0.658
60
0.731/0.477
0.753/0.557
0.788/0.552
0.784/0.500
1.254/0.787
0.901/0.634
1.029/0.693
Avg
0.649 / 0.426
0.699 /0.529
0.705/0.503
0.722/ 0.474
1.067/0.710
0.845/0.601
0.902/0.631
DS
24
0.662/0.400
0.725/0.497
0.694/0.447
0.788/0.458
0.896/0.571
0.786/0.530
0.803/0.535
TABLE II: Comparison of few-shot forecasting performance across six monitoring stations. All models are trained with 10% of the training data and evaluated at horizons of 24, 36, 48, and 60 hours. Results are reported as MSE/MAE. Bold values indicate the best performance, and underlined values indicate the second-best.
Dataset
Horizon
GPT4AP
DLinear
ETSformer
FiLM
Informer
Pyraformer
Transformer
AZ
24
0.530/0.376
0.532/0.409
0.525/0.397
0.557/0.393
0.470/0.357
0.467/0.360
0.456/0.366
36
0.613/0.419
0.605/0.455
0.611/0.443
0.634/0.433
0.565/0.403
0.548/0.403
0.607/0.428
48
0.671/0.447
0.649/0.482
0.656/0.486
0.685/0.457
0.615/0.434
0.594/0.441
0.607/0.433
60
0.712/0.467
0.684/0.503
0.705/0.515
0.726/0.476
0.644/0.449
0.650/0.464
0.688/0.467
Avg
0.632/0.427
0.618/0.462
0.624/0.460
0.651/0.440
0.574 / 0.411
0.565 / 0.417
0.590/0.424
DS
24
0.636/0.389
0.636/0.420
0.612/0.398
0.668/0.405
0.578/0.385
0.579/0.390
0.597/0.395
TABLE III: Comparison of long-term forecasting performance across six monitoring stations. All models are trained using the full training dataset and evaluated at horizons of 24, 36, 48, and 60 hours. Results are reported as MSE/MAE. Bold values indicate the best performance, and underlined values indicate the second-best.
Dataset
Horizon
GPT4AP
DLinear
ETSformer
FiLM
Informer
Pyraformer
Transformer
AZ → DS
24
0.455/0.351
0.536/0.553
0.522/0.556
0.574/0.563
0.623/0.594
0.442/0.488
0.640/0.585
36
0.502/0.380
0.616/0.590
0.591/0.579
0.691/0.612
0.679/0.617
0.510/0.537
0.646/0.620
48
0.541/0.403
0.690/0.622
0.686/0.621
0.795/0.654
0.627/0.596
0.572/0.576
0.588/0.567
60
0.583/0.424
0.753/0.649
0.789/0.660
0.894/0.694
0.719/0.677
0.618/0.617
0.601/0.596
Avg
0.520 / 0.390
0.649/0.604
0.647/0.604
0.739/0.631
0.662/0.621
0.536 / 0.555
0.619/0.592
DS → AZ
24
0.420/0.366
0.617/0.562
0.587/0.552
0.663/0.571
0.700/0.610
0.536/0.509
0.689/0.596
TABLE IV: Zero-shot forecasting performance across six cross-station transfer directions. Models are trained on a source station and evaluated on a different target station without any target-domain fine-tuning. Results are reported as MSE/MAE over four forecasting horizons (24, 36, 48, and 60 hours). Bold values indicate the best performance, and underlined values indicate the second-best.
Fig. 2: Rank ablation study of Gaussian rsLoRA. (a) Forecasting error (MSE) decreases as rank increases and saturates beyond r=32 . (b) Percentage of trainable parameters grows approximately linearly with rank. The best trade-off is achieved at r=32 , which attains near-peak performance (99.9% of the minimum MSE on average) while training only 0.309% of the full model parameters.
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Dataset
Horizon
R4
R8
R16
R32
R64
AZ
24
0.575/0.406
0.55/0.392
0.550/0.389
0.546/0.338
0.559/0.387
36
0.656/0.444
0.650/0.438
0.632/0.432
0.633/0.431
0.633/0.430
48
0.717/0.470
0.705/0.463
0.694/0.459
0.686/0.457
0.685/0.456
60
0.763/0.493
0.740/0.482
0.741/0.479
0.731/0.477
0.726/0.475
Avg
0.678/0.453
0.661/0.444
0.654/0.440
0.649 / 0.426
0.651 / 0.437
DS
24
0.690/0.419
0.661/0.405
0.663/0.401
0.662/0.400
0.677/0.398
Appendix
TABLE I: Performance comparison of different rank (R) settings on few-shot forecasting. Values reported as MSE/MAE.
Dataset
Horizon
R4
R8
R16
R32
R64
AZ
24
0.545/0.387
0.536/0.381
0.530/0.376
0.530/0.376
0.524/0.373
36
0.630/0.430
0.624/0.427
0.615/0.421
0.613/0.419
0.611/0.416
48
0.687/0.457
0.677/0.452
0.671/0.448
0.671/0.447
0.666/0.445
60
0.728/0.476
0.719/0.472
0.717/0.470
0.712/0.467
0.709/0.465
Avg
0.648/0.438
0.639/0.433
0.633/0.429
0.632 / 0.427
0.628 / 0.425
DS
24
0.650/0.398
0.641/0.393
0.636/0.388
0.636/0.389
0.644/0.391
Appendix
TABLE II: Performance comparison of different rank (R) settings on long-term forecasting. Values reported as MSE/MAE.
Dataset
Horizon
R4
R8
R16
R32
R64
AZ → DS
24
0.465/0.364
0.457/0.351
0.455/0.348
0.455/0.351
0.453/0.350
36
0.509/0.389
0.506/0.385
0.501/0.382
0.502/0.380
0.504/0.381
48
0.555/0.414
0.542/0.405
0.543/0.403
0.541/0.403
0.547/0.406
60
0.592/0.438
0.582/0.426
0.585/0.427
0.583/0.424
0.583/0.424
Avg
0.530/0.401
0.522/0.392
0.521 / 0.390
0.520 / 0.390
0.522/0.390
DS → AZ
24
0.457/0.386
0.439/0.373
0.447/0.376
0.420/0.366
0.452/0.376
Appendix
TABLE III: Performance comparison of different rank (R) settings on zero-shot forecasting. Values are reported as MSE/MAE.
University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, Anhui, China · 2Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, USTC, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China · 3The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China