CENTILE: A Telemetry Foundation Model Evaluated by the Decisions It Drives
Authors: Zifan Zhang, Zhichao Hou, Tingxiang Ji, Yuchen Liu
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
Abstract
Modern computing and networking infrastructure emits telemetry continuously, yet operators convert it into decisions with a separate predictor per task, entity, and horizon. One generative model, pretrained once over an operator's own event streams, could replace this fleet, an approach that already scales to high-cardinality streams in recommendation systems. However, point-forecast error on operational telemetry saturates near simple last-value baselines, so lower error alone need not improve the decisions it feeds. To close this gap, we present \sys, a generative foundation model for network and systems telemetry, evaluated by replaying the decisions its calibrated conditional quantiles drive. \sys treats heterogeneous telemetry as event-driven, irregularly timed entity streams and serves flexible forecast horizons in a single pass, requiring no future timestamps. To our knowledge, \sys is the first pretrained telemetry model to improve both HPC scheduling and network provisioning decisions under replay, its runtime estimator transferring zero-shot across months and its pretrained weights across domains from hours of target data. Extensive experiments on HPC job logs and network traffic confirm that \sys lowers the mean bounded slowdown of backfilling by up to approximately 77% over deployed user estimates and roughly halves the deployed rule's violation rate. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZzZTripleZzZ/all-in-one.
Generic time-series foundation models transfer poorly to wireless network telemetry whose signals are bursty, zero-inflated, and coupled across protocol layers. We present APEX, a network-native, decoder-only transformer for forecasting enterprise AP telemetry, and evaluate it on DHCP degradation as a representative network task. APEX is pre-trained on 10-channel multivariate telemetry from ~4,500 production wireless networks (~100K AP time series, 34 metrics per AP), and is available as APEX-Large (269M, cloud) and APEX-Edge (10.5M, edge). On a 192-step (4-day) DHCP degradation benchmark, APEX-Large reduces MAE by 18% over the strongest foundation-model baseline (Toto) and 38% over SARIMA, with anomaly-detection F1 = 0.93, while APEX-Edge enables sub-second, privacy-preserving inference on AP-class edge hardware. These results suggest network-native pre-training is a practical foundation for proactive wireless operations.
Machine learning models for climate and Earth science are becoming increasingly capable, yet model deployment into operational use remains a largely unaddressed challenge: general-purpose model-serving tools, such as MLflow and KServe, assume input data availability at the inference node, while data acquisition, failure handling, and preprocessing are trusted to a separate workflow. We present OpFML: Operational Forecasting with Machine Learning - a configurable pipeline integrating the four steps of operational inference into a single TOML-configured workflow: data consumption, contingency handling, preprocessing, and model inference. By consolidating these steps, OpFML removes the significant boilerplate code required for each new deployment. We demonstrate the pipeline on the operational forecasting of daily fire activity over southern Italy.
Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) have recently demonstrated strong predictive performance through in-context learning, but their deployment in high-throughput data streams remains challenging due to communication overhead and latency. We propose \textit{HINT}, a hierarchical inference framework that combines edge-based retrieval with cloud-based TFM inference. A graph-based approximate nearest neighbor memory maintained over a sliding window provides local predictions and uncertainty estimates, allowing confident samples to be processed locally while uncertain instances are selectively offloaded, together with their retrieved context, to a cloud-hosted TFM. The framework exposes an offloading threshold and a neighborhood retrieval policy that can be varied to balance predictive performance and communication cost. Experiments show \textit{HINT} consistently identifies favorable trade-offs.