Rethinking Patch Based Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Semantic Structured Partitioning

Time Series Forecasting (TSF) faces persistent challenges in modeling intricate temporal dependencies across different scales. Despite recent advances leveraging different decomposition operations and novel architectures based on CNN, MLP or Transformer, existing methods still struggle with static decomposition strategies, fragmented dependency modeling, and inflexible fusion mechanisms, limiting their ability to model intricate temporal dependencies. To explicitly solve the mentioned three problems respectively, we propose a novel Dynamic Multi-Scale Coordination Framework (DMSC) with Multi-Scale Patch Decomposition block (EMPD), Triad Interaction Block (TIB) and Adaptive Scale Routing MoE block (ASR-MoE). Specifically, EMPD is designed as a built-in component to dynamically segment sequences into hierarchical patches with exponentially scaled granularities, eliminating predefined scale constraints through input-adaptive patch adjustment. TIB then jointly models intra-patch, inter-patch, and cross-variable dependencies within each layer's decomposed representations. EMPD and TIB are jointly integrated into layers forming a multi-layer progressive cascade architecture, where coarse-grained representations from earlier layers adaptively guide fine-grained feature extraction in subsequent layers via gated pathways. And ASR-MoE dynamically fuses multi-scale predictions by leveraging specialized global and local experts with temporal-aware weighting. Comprehensive experiments on thirteen real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DMSC consistently maintains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and superior computational efficiency for TSF tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/1327679995/DMSC.

Multivariate time series forecasting remains a challenge due to the complexity of local temporal dynamics and global dependencies across multiple variables. In this paper, we propose \textbf{N}eighboring \textbf{P}atching \textbf{Mixer} (\textbf{NPMixer}), a hierarchical architecture featuring a Learnable Stationary Wavelet Transform that adaptively learns filter coefficients to decompose signals into trend and detail components in a data-dependent manner. Our framework introduces a Neighboring Mixer Block that captures local temporal dynamics through a series of hierarchical MLP layers operating on non-overlapping patches. Specifically, the mixer block utilizes MLPs to learn temporal patterns within and across these patches, expanding the receptive field to capture multi-scale dependencies. A Channel-Mixing Encoder is applied to high-frequency components to learn channel correlations while preserving the stability of the underlying global trend. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that NPMixer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving better performance in 20 out of 28 ($71.4\%$) evaluated experimental setups for MSE.

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have recently delivered impressive zero-shot performance across diverse forecasting tasks. However, real-world decision-making frequently relies on \emph{irregular multivariate time series} (IMTS), where inconsistent inter-observation intervals and asynchronous sampling across variables coexist with informative missingness. Existing TSFMs handle such inputs either through imputation that injects spurious values or through index-based positional encodings that ignore continuous time. There is still a gap in the foundation model that follows the original IMTS patterns. In this paper, we propose a hybrid attention model that learns a unified time-aware patch representation for IMTS forecasting. We first design a \emph{time-aware patch encoding} that maps a variable number of intra-patch timestamps into a fixed-size embedding, producing a uniform format for irregular patches without resorting to imputation. We then introduce a \emph{time bias attention} mechanism that calibrates inter-patch temporal misalignment and asynchronous cross-channel dependencies as auxiliary attention offset. Finally, on top of a decoder-only Transformer backbone, we adopt a \emph{hybrid causal mask} that preserves a bidirectional full view over the historical context while keeping the forecast horizon strictly autoregressive. To support large-scale pretraining under irregular settings, we also curate VersaTSA, an archive of $30$B observations that retains the native sampling sparsity of its sources. Experiments on three IMTS benchmarks and a standard regular-MTS benchmark show that our model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on IMTS and remains competitive when transferred to regular forecasting.