Time Series

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654 papers

Latest in Time Series

May 5, 2026stat.ML

Training-Free Probabilistic Time-Series Forecasting with Conformal Seasonal Pools

We propose Conformal Seasonal Pools (CSP), a training-free probabilistic time-series forecaster that mixes same-season empirical draws with signed residual draws around a seasonal naive forecast. In an audited rolling-origin benchmark on the six time-series datasets where DeepNPTS was originally evaluated (electricity, exchange_rate, solar_energy, taxi, traffic, wikipedia), CSP-Adaptive significantly outperforms DeepNPTS on every metric we report -- CRPS (per-window paired Wilcoxon p4×1010p \approx 4 \times 10^{-10}), normalized mean quantile loss (p7×1010p \approx 7 \times 10^{-10}), and empirical 95% coverage (p8×1045p \approx 8 \times 10^{-45}, mean 0.89 vs 0.66) -- while running over 500x faster on CPU. Coverage is the most decision-critical of these: a 0.95 nominal interval that contains the truth in only ~66% of cases fails the basic calibration desideratum and would not survive deployment in safety- or decision-critical settings. The failure mode is also more severe than aggregate coverage suggests: in the worst 10% of windows, DeepNPTS's prediction interval covers none of the H forecast horizons -- the entire multi-step trajectory misses the truth at every step simultaneously. This poses serious risk in safety- and decision-critical applications such as healthcare, finance, energy operations, and autonomous systems, where prediction intervals that systematically miss the truth across the entire planning horizon translate directly into misclassified patients, regulatory capital failures, grid imbalances, and safety-case violations. CSP achieves all of this with no learned parameters and no training. We argue training-free conformal samplers should be mandatory baselines when evaluating learned non-parametric forecasters.
Valery Manokhin
May 5, 2026cs.AI

OracleProto: A Reproducible Framework for Benchmarking LLM Native Forecasting via Knowledge Cutoff and Temporal Masking

Large language models are moving from static text generators toward real-world decision-support systems, where forecasting is a composite capability that links information gathering, evidence integration, situational judgment, and action-oriented decision making. This capability is in broad demand across finance, policy, industry, and scientific research, yet its evaluation remains difficult: live benchmarks evaluate forecasts before answers exist, making them the cleanest way to measure forecasting ability, but they expire once events resolve; retrospective benchmarks are reproducible, but they cannot reliably distinguish genuine forecasting from facts a model may have already learned during pretraining. Prompting models to "pretend not to know" cannot replace a genuine knowledge boundary. We propose OracleProto, a reproducible framework for evaluating LLM native forecasting capability. OracleProto reconstructs resolved events into time-bounded forecasting samples by combining model-cutoff-aligned sample admission, tool-level temporal masking, content-level leakage detection, discrete answer normalization, and hierarchical scoring. Instantiated on a FutureX-Past-derived dataset with six contemporary LLMs, OracleProto distinguishes forecasting quality, sampling stability, and cost efficiency under controlled information boundaries, while reducing residual leakage to the 1%1\% level, an order of magnitude below tool-only temporal filtering. OracleProto turns LLM forecasting from one-off evaluation into an auditable, reusable, and trainable dataset-level capability, providing a unified interface for fair cross-model comparison and a controlled signal source for downstream SFT and RL. Code and data are available at https://github.com/MaYiding/OracleProto and https://huggingface.co/datasets/MaYiding/OracleProto.
Yiding Ma, Chengyun Ruan, Kaibo Huang +2
May 5, 2026cs.AI

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.
Seunghan Lee, Jun Seo, Jaehoon Lee +7
May 4, 2026cs.LG

Global and Local Topology-Aware Attention with Persistent Homology and Euler Biases for Time-Series Forecasting

Scientific time series often encode predictive geometric structure, including connectivity, cycles, shell-like geometry, directional changes, and nonlinear neighborhoods, that standard dot-product attention does not explicitly represent. We introduce a topology-aware attention framework that adds such structure to attention logits using persistent homology (H0-H2), anchored Euler characteristic transforms, and kernel-Hilbert channels. A validation-gated local residual captures local topological signals, including a Zeng-style local H0 component, only when held-out validation data support the correction. Exact Vietoris-Rips computations and smooth topological surrogates are evaluated under a no-leakage protocol with train-only calibration, validation-only selection, and test-only reporting. We evaluate guarded topology-aware variants across three architecture families: lightweight attention/Ridge, PatchTSTForRegression, and TimeSeriesTransformerForPrediction. Experiments include synthetic benchmarks isolating higher-order topology and real datasets covering CO2, S&P 500 return-window geometry, and NASA IMS bearing degradation. The audit uses matched paired comparisons across seven dataset units, three random seeds, and three chronological splits, giving 63 paired units per architecture and 189 paired units overall. Topology-aware models show positive paired effects when geometry is predictive, with heterogeneous magnitude across datasets and architectures. Lightweight attention/Ridge improves in 46 of 63 units, with mean relative RMSE reduction of 12.5% and paired randomization p=7.2e-4; PatchTST improves in 33 units and retains the baseline in 20 units, with 23.5% reduction and p=3.5e-5; and TimeSeriesTransformer improves in 47 units, with 47.8% reduction and p<1e-4. The results support topology as a validation-selected, architecture-compatible inductive bias.
Usef Faghihi, Amir Saki
May 4, 2026cs.LG

Temporal-Decay Shapley: A Time-Aware Data Valuation Framework for Time-Series Data

With the rapid development of machine learning applications on time-series data, accurately assessing the value of training samples has become essential for data selection, noise detection, and model optimization. However, traditional data valuation methods usually assume that samples are independent and identically distributed, and thus ignore the time-varying nature of sample value in time-series data. This paper proposes an improved temporal Shapley data valuation method that enables accurate sample valuation for time-series data through a temporal decay mechanism and a multi-scale fusion strategy. Specifically, we propose three progressively enhanced temporal Shapley methods. Temporal-Decay Shapley (TDS) incorporates temporal information into Shapley value computation through exponential decay weights; the improved TDS adopts power exponential decay to better adapt to nonlinear temporal drift; and Multi-Scale Temporal-Decay Shapley (MS-TDS) constructs a multi-scale fusion mechanism that balances the value of short-term hotspot samples and long-term foundational samples through parallel multi-scale valuation and sample-level adaptive fusion. Experimental results show that the proposed methods generally outperform traditional methods in noise detection and high-value data identification tasks, with more evident advantages under most strongly temporal settings, thereby effectively improving the accuracy and robustness of data valuation.
Chuwen Pang, Bing Mi, Kongyang Chen
May 2, 2026cs.AI

TimeTok: Granularity-Controllable Time-Series Generation via Hierarchical Tokenization

Time-series generative models often lack control over temporal granularity, forcing users to accept whatever granularity the model produces. To enable truly user-driven generation, we introduce TimeTok, a unified framework for Granularity-Controllable Time-Series Generation (GC-TSG), which generates time series at any target granularity from any coarser input (e.g., rough sketches) or from scratch. At the core of TimeTok is a hierarchical tokenization strategy that maps time series into an ordered sequence of tokens, from coarse to fine temporal granularity. Our autoregressive generation process operates across these granularity levels, producing token blocks that are decoded back into continuous time series. This design naturally enables GC-TSG - including standard generation - within a single framework, where controlling the number of token blocks provides explicit control over output detail. Experiments show that TimeTok excels at GC-TSG tasks while achieving state-of-the-art performance in standard generation. Furthermore, we showcase TimeTok's potential as a foundational tokenizer by training on multiple datasets with heterogeneous temporal granularities, verifying strong transferability that consistently outperforms models trained on individual datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first unified framework that covers the full generative spectrum for time series, offering a valuable foundation for models that benefit from diverse temporal granularities.
Seokhyun Lee, Jaeho Kim, Changjun Oh +2
May 2, 2026physics.ins-det

Forecasting Source Stability in Scientific Experiments using Temporal Learning Models: A Case Study from Tritium Monitoring

The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) aims to measure the absolute neutrino mass with unprecedented sensitivity, requiring precise monitoring of the windowless gaseous tritium source, where tritium beta decay occurs. To track variations of the source activity, beta-induced X-ray spectroscopy provides real-time diagnostics. However, traditional drift detection methods struggle with the infrequent and transient nature of instability events in gaseous tritium. This study bridges the gap between state-of-the-art time-series forecasting models and real-world experimental applications by leveraging deep learning to predict the time to stability after instabilities. Unlike standard benchmarking approaches that emphasize algorithmic performance on fixed datasets, we apply forecasting models -- including LSTM, N-BEATS, TFT, NHITS, DLinear, NLinear, TSMixer, and Chronos-LLM -- to complex, large-scale experimental data. Our findings highlight two challenges: learning from sparse instability events and forecasting long time horizons (i.e., predicting hundreds of future points), both of which are ongoing challenges in time-series forecasting and remain active areas of research. This prediction task has direct experimental value by enabling better scheduling and maintenance planning. A reliable forecast of stability time allows for more efficient measurement and task management during stabilization periods. Through model selection, we identified N-BEATS as the top performer, excelling in accuracy and repeatability, demonstrating that deep learning can optimize large-scale physics experiments.
Nicholas Tan Jerome, Nadia Aouadi, Christoph Koehler +2
May 2, 2026cs.LG

CombinationTS: A Modular Framework for Understanding Time-Series Forecasting Models

Recent progress in time-series forecasting has led to rapidly increasing architectural complexity, yet many reported State-of-the-Art gains are statistically fragile or misattributed. We argue that progress requires a shift from model selection to modular attribution, identifying which components truly drive performance. We propose CombinationTS, a self-contained probabilistic evaluation framework that decomposes forecasting models into orthogonal modules--Input Transformation, Embedding, Encoder, Decoder, and Output Transformation--and evaluates them under a shared evaluation condition space. By quantifying each component via marginalized performance (μμ) and stability (σσ), CombinationTS enables robust attribution beyond fragile point estimates. Through large-scale paired evaluation, we uncover the Identity Paradox: once the data view (Embedding) is well-designed, a parameter-free Identity Encoder often matches or outperforms complex backbones. We further show that explicit structural priors introduced via Input Transformations yield a more favorable performance-stability trade-off than increasing Encoder complexity, establishing a principled baseline for architectural necessity.
Xiaorui Wang, Fanda Fan, Chenxi Wang +9
May 1, 2026cs.LG

PAMNet: Cycle-aware Phase-Amplitude Modulation Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Reliable periodic patterns serve as a fundamental basis for accurate multivariate time series forecasting. However, existing methods either implicitly extract periodicity through complex model architectures (e.g., Transformers) with high computational overhead or overlook the intrinsic phase-amplitude coupling when modeling periodic components explicitly. To address these issues, we propose a novel Cycle-aware Phase-Amplitude Modulation Network (PAMNet) that explicitly decomposes periodic patterns into complementary phase and amplitude components. The core innovation lies in its dual-branch modulator, featuring dedicated learnable embeddings for phase positioning and amplitude modulation. The phase branch employs cyclical embeddings to capture phase-dependent mean shifts, while the amplitude branch models intensity variations to adapt to changes in variance. A lightweight modulator with element-wise fusion efficiently combines these components, enabling explicit modeling of their interactions without complex attention mechanisms. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance through its novel phase-amplitude decoupling mechanism, offering a new perspective for cyclical modeling in time series forecasting.
Yingbo Zhou, Yutong Ye, Zhiwei Ling +5
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

Learning Fingerprints for Medical Time Series with Redundancy-Constrained Information Maximization

Learning meaningful representations from medical time series (MedTS) such as ECG or EEG signals is a critical challenge. These signals are often high-dimensional, variable-length and rife with noise. Existing self-supervised approaches, such as Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) are highly effective for pre-training general-purpose encoders. However, they do not explicitly learn compact and semantically interpretable latent representations, typically relying on heuristic aggregation strategies such as global average pooling or a designated [CLS] token. We propose a novel framework that compresses a variable-length MedTS into a fixed-size set of kk latent Fingerprint Tokens. Our architecture employs a cross-attention bottleneck to generate these tokens and is trained with a dual-objective function. The first objective is a reconstruction loss, which ensures the tokens are \textit{sufficient statistics} for the original data. The second, a diversity penalty based on the Total Coding Rate (TCR), explicitly minimizes the redundancy between tokens, encouraging them to become statistically \textit{disentangled} representations. We present the theoretical justification for our method, framing it as a novel \textbf{Disentangled Rate-Distortion} problem. This approach produces a low-dimensional, interpretable, and sample-efficient representation, where each token is encouraged to capture an independent factor of variation, paving the way for more robust digital biomarkers.
Huayu Li, ZhengXiao He, Xiwen Chen +4
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

SPLICE: Latent Diffusion over JEPA Embeddings for Conformal Time-Series Inpainting

Generative models for time-series imputation achieve strong reconstruction accuracy, yet provide no finite-sample reliability guarantees, a critical limitation in power systems where imputed values inform dispatch and planning. We introduce SPLICE (Self-supervised Predictive Latent Inpainting with Conformal Envelopes), a modular framework coupling latent generative imputation with distribution-free, online-adaptive prediction intervals. A JEPA encoder maps daily load segments into a 64-dimensional latent space; a conditional latent bridge with four sampling modes generates candidate gap trajectories; an hourly-conditioned decoder maps back to signal space; and Adaptive Conformal Inference (ACI) wraps the output with coverage-guaranteed prediction bands. The flow-matching variant achieves comparable quality to DDIM in 5--10 ODE steps (5-10x speedup). On thirteen load datasets (nine proprietary, three UCI Electricity, ETTh1), SPLICE achieves the lowest mean Load-only MSE (0.056), winning 9/12 non-degenerate datasets at 91-day gaps and 18/32 across all gap lengths vs. five established baselines, and produces the best CRPS (0.161, -18.3% vs. the strongest competitor). ACI delivers 93--95% empirical coverage, correcting under-coverage failures of up to 7.5 pp observed with static conformal prediction. A pooled JEPA encoder trained on nine feeds transfers to four unseen domains, matching or exceeding per-dataset oracles with only a quick bridge fine-tuning.
Arnaud Zinflou
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

Explainable Load Forecasting with Covariate-Informed Time Series Foundation Models

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have recently emerged as general-purpose forecasting models and show considerable potential for applications in energy systems. However, applications in critical infrastructure like power grids require transparency to ensure trust and reliability and cannot rely on pure black-box models. To enhance the transparency of TSFMs, we propose an efficient algorithm for computing Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) tailored to these models. The proposed approach leverages the flexibility of TSFMs with respect to input context length and provided covariates. This property enables efficient temporal and covariate masking (selectively withholding inputs), allowing for a scalable explanation of model predictions using SHAP. We evaluate two TSFMs - Chronos-2 and TabPFN-TS - on a day-ahead load forecasting task for a transmission system operator (TSO). In a zero-shot setting, both models achieve predictive performance competitive with a Transformer model trained specifically on multiple years of TSO data. The explanations obtained through our proposed approach align with established domain knowledge, particularly as the TSFMs appropriately use weather and calendar information for load prediction. Overall, we demonstrate that TSFMs can serve as transparent and reliable tools for operational energy forecasting.
Matthias Hertel, Alexandra Nikoltchovska, Sebastian Pütz +3
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

Comparative Analysis of Polygon-Based and Global Machine Learning Models for Bus Occupancy Prediction

Accurate forecasting of bus ridership (passengers numbers) is crucial for efficient management and optimization of public transport systems. Traditional forecasting models often fail to capture the unique and localized dynamics of different urban areas by treating the entire city as a single, homogeneous region. This paper introduces a novel framework that enhances bus ridership prediction by integrating a spatial clustering methodology with multi-dimensional feature analysis. The proposed framework utilizes a diverse set of data, including bus ridership data (by route number, time, and bus stop) complemented by a variety of open source data, such as spatial features (e.g., attractive destinations), meteorological conditions (e.g., temperature, rainfall), and temporal patterns (e.g., time of day, day of week). By clustering the urban area into distinct regions, based on the principle that bus stops in close proximity share similar ridership characteristics, a separate local forecasting model is trained for each of these clusters. This localized approach demonstrates an accuracy comparable to that of global models. The findings suggest that a spatially-aware, localized modeling strategy is effective for public transport prediction, paving the way for more targeted and efficient service improvements.
Daniel Azenkot, Michael Fire, Eran Ben Elia
Apr 30, 2026physics.geo-ph

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising

The demand for high-resolution subsurface imaging and continuous Earth monitoring has driven rapid growth in active and passive seismic data from dense geophone deployments, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) arrays, and large-scale 2D and 3D surveys. This expansion makes complex noise suppression increasingly challenging, especially when signal fidelity must be preserved. Conventional supervised deep learning methods are often task-specific, require large paired datasets, and can suffer from domain shift under new acquisition conditions. Foundation models offer a promising alternative, but pre-training seismic foundation models from scratch requires massive domain-specific data and substantial computation. We propose an efficient framework that repurposes general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for geophysical tasks through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning. The architecture uses a pre-trained VFM, a DINOv3 encoder, adapted with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enable effective feature adaptation with few additional parameters. To improve robustness under unseen field conditions without ground truth, we introduce a kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation module that updates only LoRA parameters during inference. This module self-calibrates the model to site-specific noise by identifying information-rich regions via kurtosis and performing self-training without labeled data. Experiments on public exploration seismic images and DAS vertical seismic profiling data from the Utah FORGE site show that the framework matches or outperforms domain-specific models. Tests on unseen cross-site data from a land survey in China and the Groß Schönebeck geothermal site in Germany further demonstrate strong generalization and effective signal-noise separation. These results highlight the potential of adapting pre-trained VFMs to data-intensive problems in exploration seismology.
Jiahua Zhao, Umair bin Waheed, Jing Sun +3
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

ITS-Mina: A Harris Hawks Optimization-Based All-MLP Framework with Iterative Refinement and External Attention for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting plays a pivotal role in numerous real-world applications, including financial analysis, energy management, and traffic planning. While Transformer-based architectures have gained popularity for this task, recent studies reveal that simpler MLP-based models can achieve competitive or superior performance with significantly reduced computational cost. In this paper, we propose ITS-Mina, a novel all-MLP framework for multivariate time series forecasting that integrates three key innovations: (1) an iterative refinement mechanism that progressively enhances temporal representations by repeatedly applying a shared-parameter residual mixer stack, effectively deepening the model's computational capacity without multiplying the number of distinct parameters; (2) an external attention module that replaces traditional self-attention with learnable memory units, capturing cross-sample global dependencies at linear computational complexity; and (3) a Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) algorithm for automatic dropout rate tuning, enabling adaptive regularization tailored to each dataset. Extensive experiments on six widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that ITS-Mina achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance compared to eleven baseline models across multiple forecasting horizons.
Pourya Zamanvaziri, Amirhossein Sadr, Aida Pakniyat +1
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

Differentiable latent structure discovery for interpretable forecasting in clinical time series

Background: Timely, uncertainty-aware forecasting from irregular electronic health records (EHR) can support critical-care decisions, yet most approaches either impute to a grid or sacrifice interpretability. We introduce StructGP, a continuous-time multi-task Gaussian process that couples process convolutions with differentiable structure learning to uncover a sparse, ordered directed acyclic graph (DAG) of inter-variable dependencies while preserving principled uncertainty. We further propose LP-StructGP, which augments StructGP with latent pathways-shared, temporally shifted trajectories inferred via subject-specific coupling filters and a softmax gating mechanism-to capture cross-patient progression patterns. Both models are trained under sparsity and acyclicity constraints (augmented Lagrangian, Adam) using scalable low-rank updates. Results: In simulations, the approach reliably recovers ground-truth graphs (Structural Hamming Distance approaching 0 as cohorts grow) and pathway assignments (high Adjusted Rand Index). On a MIMIC-IV septic shock cohort (n=1,008; norepinephrine, creatinine, mean arterial pressure), StructGP improves short-horizon (6 h) forecasting over independent-task baselines (average RMSE 0.68 [95%CI: 0.63--0.74] vs. 0.88 [0.83-0.94]) and, with 15 additional inputs, markedly outperforms unstructured kernels (0.63 [0.58-0.69] vs. 3.02 [2.85-3.18]) with superior calibration (coverage 0.96 vs. 0.84). On the PhysioNet Challenge (12k patients, 41 variables), StructGP attains competitive accuracy (MAE 3.72e-2) relative to a state-of-the-art graph neural model while maintaining calibrated uncertainty. Conclusion: These results show that structured process convolutions with latent pathways deliver interpretable, scalable, and well-calibrated forecasting for irregular clinical time series.
Ivan Lerner, Jean Feydy, Alexandre Kalimouttou +2
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

CastFlow: Learning Role-Specialized Agentic Workflows for Time Series Forecasting

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in time series forecasting. However, most existing LLM-based forecasting methods still follow a static generative paradigm that directly maps historical observations to future values in a single pass. Under this paradigm, forecasting is constrained by limited temporal pattern extraction, single-round acquisition of contextual features, one-shot forecast generation, and lack of support from ensemble forecasts. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose CastFlow, a dynamic agentic forecasting framework that enables multi-view temporal pattern extraction, multi-round contextual features acquisition, iterative forecast refinement, and forecasting with ensemble forecasts. First, CastFlow organizes the forecasting process into planning, action, forecasting, and reflection, establishing an agentic workflow. Second, this workflow is supported by a memory module that retrieves prior experience and a multi-view toolkit that constructs diagnostic evidence and provides a reliable ensemble forecast baseline. Third, CastFlow adopts a role-specialized design that combines general-purpose reasoning with specialized numerical forecasting. Under this design, a frozen LLM preserves general-purpose reasoning, while a fine-tuned domain-specific LLM performs evidence-guided numerical forecasting based on the ensemble forecast baseline, rather than from scratch. To optimize a fine-tuned domain-specific LLM, we further develop a two-stage workflow-oriented training that combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). To evaluate the effectiveness of CastFlow, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse datasets and show that it achieves superior overall results against strong baselines. We hope that this work can serve as a step toward more adaptive and accurate time series forecasting.
Bokai Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Zhiding Liu +6
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

Probabilistic Circuits for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Joint probabilistic modeling is essential for forecasting irregular multivariate time series (IMTS) to accurately quantify uncertainty. Existing approaches often struggle to balance model expressivity with consistent marginalization, frequently leading to unreliable or contradictory forecasts. To address this, we propose CircuITS, a novel architecture for probabilistic IMTS forecasting based on probabilistic circuits. Our model is flexible in capturing intricate dependencies between time series channels while structurally guaranteeing valid joint distributions. Experiments on four real world datasets demonstrate that CircuITS achieves superior joint and marginal density estimation compared to state of the art baselines.
Christian Klötergens, Vijaya Krishna Yalavarthi, Lars Schmidt-Thieme
Apr 30, 2026cs.LG

Soft-MSM: Differentiable Context-Aware Elastic Alignment for Time Series

Elastic distances like dynamic time warping (DTW) are central to time series machine learning because they compare sequences under local temporal misalignment. Soft-DTW is an adaptation of DTW that can be used as a gradient-based loss by replacing the hard minimum in its dynamic-programming recursion with a smooth relaxation. However, this approach does not directly extend to elastic distances whose transition costs depend on the local alignment context. Move-Split-Merge (MSM) is one such distance: it uses context-aware split and merge penalties and has often outperformed DTW in supervised and unsupervised time series machine learning tasks such as classification and clustering. We introduce Soft-MSM, a smooth relaxation of MSM and an elastic alignment loss with context-aware transition costs. Central to the formulation is a smooth gated surrogate for MSM's piecewise split/merge cost, which enables gradients through both the dynamic-programming recursion and the local transition structure. We derive the forward recursion, backward recursion, soft alignment matrix, closed-form gradient, limiting behaviour, and divergence-corrected formulation. Experiments on 112 UCR datasets show that Soft-MSM gives lower MSM barycentre loss than existing MSM barycentre methods, and yields significantly better clustering and nearest-centroid classification performance than Soft-DTW-based alternatives. An implementation is available in the open-source \texttt{aeon} toolkit.
Christopher Holder, Anthony Bagnall
Apr 29, 2026cs.CV

VTBench: A Multimodal Framework for Time-Series Classification with Chart-Based Representations

Time-series classification (TSC) has advanced significantly with deep learning, yet most models rely solely on raw numerical inputs, overlooking alternative representations. While texture-based encodings such as Gramian Angular Fields (GAF) and Recurrence Plots (RP) convert time series into 2D images, they often require heavy preprocessing and yield less intuitive representations. In contrast, chart-based visualizations offer more interpretable alternatives and show promise in specific domains; however, their effectiveness remains underexplored, with limited systematic evaluation across chart types, visual encoding choices, and datasets. In this work, we introduce VTBench, a systematic and extensible framework that re-examines TSC through multimodal fusion of raw sequences and chart-based visualizations. VTBench generates lightweight, human-interpretable plots -- line, area, bar, and scatter, providing complementary views of the same signal. We develop a modular architecture supporting multiple fusion strategies, including single-chart visual-numerical fusion, multi-chart visual fusion, and full multimodal fusion with raw inputs. Through experiments across 31 UCR datasets, we show that: (1) chart-only models are competitive in selected settings, particularly on smaller datasets; (2) combining multiple chart types can improve accuracy by capturing complementary visual cues; and (3) multimodal models improve or maintain performance when visual features provide non-redundant information, but may degrade accuracy when they introduce redundancy. We further distill practical guidelines for selecting chart types, fusion strategies, and configurations. VTBench establishes a unified foundation for interpretable and effective multimodal time-series classification.
Madhumitha Venkatesan, Xuyang Chen, Dongyu Liu
Apr 29, 2026cs.LG

Preserving Temporal Dynamics in Time Series Generation

Time-series data augmentation plays a crucial role in regression-oriented forecasting tasks, where limited data restricts the performance of deep learning models. While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown promise in synthetic time-series generation, existing approaches primarily focus on matching marginal data distributions and often overlook the temporal dynamics that naturally exist in the original multivariate time series. When generating multivariate time series, this mismatch leads to distribution shift and temporal drift, thereby degrading the fidelity of the synthetic sequences. In this work, we propose a model-agnostic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based framework to mitigate distribution shift and preserve temporal dynamics in synthetic time series. We provide a theoretical analysis of how conditional generative models accumulate deviations under sequential generation and demonstrate that the MCMC algorithm can correct these discrepancies by enforcing consistency with empirical transition statistics between neighboring time points. Extensive experiments on the Lorenz, Licor, ETTh, and ILI datasets using RCGAN, GCWGAN, TimeGAN, SigCWGAN, and AECGAN demonstrate that the proposed MCMC framework consistently improves autocorrelation alignment, skewness error, kurtosis error, R2^2, discriminative score, and predictive score. These results suggest that synthetic time series consistent with the original data require explicit preservation of transition laws rather than solely relying on adversarial distribution matching, thereby offering a principled direction for improving generative modeling of time-series data.
Ci Lin, Futong Li, Tet Yeap +1
Apr 29, 2026cs.LG

Exploring the Potential of Probabilistic Transformer for Time Series Modeling: A Report on the ST-PT Framework

The Probabilistic Transformer (PT) establishes that the Transformer's self-attention plus its feed-forward block is mathematically equivalent to Mean-Field Variational Inference (MFVI) on a Conditional Random Field (CRF). Under this equivalence the Transformer ceases to be a black-box neural network and becomes a programmable factor graph: graph topology, factor potentials, and the message-passing schedule are all explicit and inspectable primitives that can be engineered. PT was originally developed for natural language and in this report we investigate its potential for time series. We first lift PT into the Spatial-Temporal Probabilistic Transformer (ST-PT) to repair PT's missing channel axis and weak per-step semantics, and adopt ST-PT as a shared cornerstone backbone. We then identify three distinct properties that PT/ST-PT offers as a factor-graph model and derive three Research Questions, one per property, that probe how each property can be exploited in time series: RQ1. The graph topology and potentials are direct programmable primitives. Can this be used to inject symbolic time-series priors into ST-PT through structural graph modifications, especially under data scarcity and noise? RQ2. The CRF's factor matrices are the operator's potentials. Can an external condition program these factor matrices on a per-sample basis, so that conditional generation becomes structural rather than feature-level modulation of a fixed one? RQ3. Each MFVI iteration is a Bayesian posterior update on the factor graph. Can this turn the latent transition of latent-space AutoRegressive (AR) forecasting from an opaque MLP into a principled posterior update, and can a CRF teacher distill its latents into the AR student to counter cumulative error? We give one empirical study per question. Together, these three studies position ST-PT as a programmable framework for time-series modeling.
Zhangzhi Xiong, Haoyi Wu, You Wu +3
Apr 28, 2026cs.AI

Evaluating Strategic Reasoning in Forecasting Agents

Forecasting benchmarks produce accuracy leaderboards but little insight into why some forecasters are more accurate than others. We introduce Bench to the Future 2 (BTF-2), 1,417 pastcasting questions with a frozen 15M-document research corpus in which agents reproducibly research and forecast offline, producing full reasoning traces. BTF-2 detects accuracy differences of 0.004 Brier score, and can distinguish differential agent strengths in research vs. judgment. We build a forecaster 0.011 Brier more accurate than any single frontier agent, and use it to evaluate agent strategic reasoning without hindsight bias. We find the better forecaster differs primarily in its pre-mortem analysis of its blind spots and consideration of black swans. Expert human forecasters found the dominant strategic reasoning failures of frontier agents are in assessing political and business leaders' incentives, judging their likelihood to follow through on stated plans, and modeling institutional processes.
Tom Liptay, Dan Schwarz, Rafael Poyiadzi +2
Apr 28, 2026cs.LG

EvoTSC: Evolving Feature Learning Models for Time Series Classification via Genetic Programming

Time series classification is an important analytical task across diverse domains. However, its practical application is often hindered by the scarcity of labeled data and the requirement for substantial computational resources. To address these challenges, this paper proposes EvoTSC, a novel genetic programming approach designed to automatically evolve lightweight feature learning models for time series classification. The core of EvoTSC is a carefully designed multi-layer program structure that strategically embeds diverse forms of prior expert knowledge into the evolutionary process, effectively guiding the search toward operations known to be highly effective for time series analysis. To mitigate the common overfitting problem in time series classification, a tailored Pareto tournament selection strategy is proposed to favor models that perform consistently well across varying training data subsets, promoting the discovery of highly generalizable models. Extensive experiments conducted on univariate time series classification datasets demonstrate that EvoTSC significantly outperforms eleven benchmark methods in most comparisons. Further analyses verify the contribution of each component and the resource efficiency of the evolved models.
Xuanhao Yang, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

Prior-Agnostic Robust Forecast Aggregation

Robust forecast aggregation combines the predictions of multiple information sources to perform well in the worst case across all possible information structures. Previous work largely focuses on settings with a known binary state space, where the state is either 0 or 1. We study prior-agnostic robust forecast aggregation in which the aggregator observes only experts' reports, yet is ignorant of both the underlying joint information structure and the full prior, including the underlying state space. Unlike the standard model that fixes the binary state space {0, 1}, we allow the (binary) unknown state values to be arbitrary numbers in [0, 1], so the same reported probability may correspond to very different realized outcome frequencies across environments. Our main contribution is a simple, explicit, closed-form log-odds aggregator that linearly pools forecasts in logit space, together with (nearly-)tight minimax-regret guarantees across three knowledge regimes. We first show that under conditionally independent (CI) signals, robust aggregation with an unknown state space is strictly harder than in the known-state setting by establishing a larger lower bound, and our aggregation rule can achieve a worst-case regret of 0.0255. Along the way, we also characterize tight regret bounds for Blackwell-ordered structures and for general information structures. In the classical setting with known state space {0,1}, our aggregator achieves regret strictly below 0.0226 for CI structures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first explicit closed-form aggregator that achieves a regret upper bound strictly less than 0.0226. Finally, we extend the model where the aggregator additionally knows each expert's marginal forecast distribution; in this setting, with the CI structures, we show that a generalized log-odds rule achieves regret of 0.0228, complementing with a lower bound of 0.0225.
Zhi Chen, Cheng Peng, Wei Tang
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

Hindsight Preference Optimization for Financial Time Series Advisory

Time series models predict numbers; decision-makers need advisory -- directional signals with reasoning, actionable suggestions, and risk management. Training language models for such predictive advisory faces a fundamental challenge: quality depends on outcomes unknown at prediction time. We bridge two ideas from reinforcement learning -- using information unavailable during execution to retrospectively generate training signal, and preference alignment -- and propose Hindsight Preference Optimization: observed outcomes let an LLM judge rank candidate advisories on dimensions that scalar metrics cannot capture, producing preference pairs for DPO without human annotation. We apply this to Vision-Language-Model-based predictive advisories on S&P 500 equity time series, demonstrated by a 4B model outperforming its 235B teacher on both accuracy and advisory quality.
Yanwei Cui, Guanghui Wang, Xing Zhang +7
Apr 24, 2026cs.LG

FETS Benchmark: Foundation Models Outperform Dataset-specific Machine Learning in Energy Time Series Forecasting

Driven by the transition towards a climate-neutral energy system, accurate energy time series forecasting is critical for planning and operation. Yet, it remains largely a dataset-specific task, requiring comprehensive training data, limiting scalability, and resulting in high model development and maintenance effort. Recently, foundation models that aim to learn generalizable patterns via extensive pretraining have shown superior performance in multiple prediction tasks. Despite their success and strong potential to address challenges in energy forecasting, their application in this domain remains largely unexplored. We address this gap by presenting the Foundation Models in Energy Time Series Forecasting (FETS) benchmark. We (1) provide a structured overview of energy forecasting use cases along three main dimensions: stakeholders, attributes, and data categories; (2) collect and analyze 54 datasets across 9 data categories, guided by typical stakeholder interests; (3) benchmark foundation models against classical machine learning approaches across different forecasting settings. Foundation models consistently outperform dataset-specific optimized machine learning approaches across all settings and data categories, despite the latter having seen the full historic target data during training. In particular, covariate-informed foundation models achieve the strongest performance. Further analysis reveals a strong correlation between predictive performance and spectral entropy, performance saturation beyond a certain context length, and improved performance at higher aggregation levels such as national load, district heating, and power grid data. Overall, our findings highlight the strong potential of foundation models as scalable and generalizable forecasting solutions for the energy domain, particularly in data-constrained and privacy-sensitive settings.
Marco Obermeier, Marco Pruckner, Florian Haselbeck +1
Apr 23, 2026cs.CL

Fixation Sequences as Time Series: A Topological Approach to Dyslexia Detection

Persistent homology, a method from topological data analysis, extracts robust, multi-scale features from data. It produces stable representations of time series by applying varying thresholds to their values (a process known as a \textit{filtration}). We develop novel filtrations for time series and introduce topological methods for the analysis of eye-tracking data, by interpreting fixation sequences as time series, and constructing ``hybrid models'' that combine topological features with traditional statistical features. We empirically evaluate our method by applying it to the task of dyslexia detection from eye-tracking-while-reading data using the Copenhagen Corpus, which contains scanpaths from dyslexic and non-dyslexic L1 and L2 readers. Our hybrid models outperform existing approaches that rely solely on traditional features, showing that persistent homology captures complementary information encoded in fixation sequences. The strength of these topological features is further underscored by their achieving performance comparable to established baseline methods. Importantly, our proposed filtrations outperform existing ones.
Marius Huber, David R. Reich, Lena A. Jäger
Apr 23, 2026cs.LG

ARFBench: Benchmarking Time Series Question Answering Ability for Software Incident Response

Time series question-answering (TSQA), in which we ask natural language questions to infer and reason about properties of time series, is a promising yet underexplored capability of foundation models. In this work, we present ARFBench, a TSQA benchmark that evaluates the understanding of multimodal foundation models (FMs) on time series anomalies prevalent in software incident data. ARFBench consists of 750 questions across 142 time series and 5.38M data points from 63 production incidents sourced exclusively from internal telemetry at Datadog. We evaluate leading proprietary and open-source LLMs, VLMs, and time series FMs and observe that frontier VLMs perform markedly better than existing baselines; the leading model (GPT-5) achieves a 62.7% accuracy and 51.9% F1. We next demonstrate the promise of specialized multimodal approaches. We develop a novel TSFM + VLM hybrid prototype which we post-train on a small set of synthetic and real data that yields comparable overall F1 and accuracy with frontier models. Lastly, we find models and human domain experts exhibit complementary strengths. We define a model-expert oracle, a best-of-2 oracle selector over model and expert answers, yielding 82.8% F1 and 87.2% accuracy and establishing a new superhuman frontier for future TSQA models. The benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Datadog/ARFBench.
Stephan Xie, Ben Cohen, Mononito Goswami +6
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

A Hybridizable Neural Time Integrator for Stable Autoregressive Forecasting

For autoregressive modeling of chaotic dynamical systems over long time horizons, the stability of both training and inference is a major challenge in building scientific foundation models. We present a hybrid technique in which an autoregressive transformer is embedded within a novel shooting-based mixed finite element scheme, exposing topological structure that enables provable stability. For forward problems, we prove preservation of discrete energies, while for training we prove uniform bounds on gradients, provably avoiding the exploding gradient problem. Combined with a vision transformer, this yields latent tokens admitting structure-preserving dynamics. We outperform modern foundation models with a 65×65\times reduction in model parameters and long-horizon forecasting of chaotic systems. A "mini-foundation" model of a fusion component shows that 12 simulations suffice to train a real-time surrogate, achieving a 9,000×9{,}000\times speedup over particle-in-cell simulation.
Brooks Kinch, Xiaozhe Hu, Yilong Huang +6
Apr 22, 2026cs.CL

DialToM: A Theory of Mind Benchmark for Forecasting State-Driven Dialogue Trajectories

We introduce DialToM, an annotated Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmark built from naturalistic human-human dialogues using a multiple-choice evaluation framework. Concurrent with recent work showing a gap between explicit mental-state inference and applied ToM in synthetic settings~\cite{gu2024simpletom}, we establish a stricter \emph{State-Driven Diagnostic Probe} in which models must forecast state-consistent dialogue trajectories solely from isolated mental-state profiles without dialogue context. Our evaluation reveals a systematic reasoning asymmetry -- LLMs excel at inferring mental states (Literal ToM) but struggle to leverage them for social forecasting (Functional ToM). Crucially, a domain expert achieves 100% accuracy on this task, proving its validity and establishing a stark human-AI capability gap. Further, a teacher-student reasoning injection probe shows that Gemini 3 Pro -- which establishes the leading baseline -- possesses robust Functional ToM capabilities for context-free forecasting that are transferable to weaker models. DialToM, its evaluation code, and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Stealth-py/DialToM.
Neemesh Yadav, Palakorn Achananuparp, Jing Jiang +1
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Adaptive Conformal Anomaly Detection with Time Series Foundation Models for Signal Monitoring

We propose a post-hoc adaptive conformal anomaly detection method for monitoring time series that leverages predictions from pre-trained foundation models without requiring additional fine-tuning. Our method yields an interpretable anomaly score directly interpretable as a false alarm rate (p-value), facilitating transparent and actionable decision-making. It employs weighted quantile conformal prediction bounds and adaptively learns optimal weighting parameters from past predictions, enabling calibration under distribution shifts and stable false alarm control, while preserving out-of-sample guarantees. As a model-agnostic solution, it integrates seamlessly with foundation models and supports rapid deployment in resource-constrained environments. This approach addresses key industrial challenges such as limited data availability, lack of training expertise, and the need for immediate inference, while taking advantage of the growing accessibility of time series foundation models. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach delivers strong performance, combining simplicity, interpretability, robustness, and adaptivity.
Natalia Martinez Gil, Fearghal O'Donncha, Wesley M. Gifford +3
Apr 21, 2026cs.AI

Time Series Augmented Generation for Financial Applications

Evaluating the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex, quantitative financial tasks is a critical and unsolved challenge. Standard benchmarks often fail to isolate an agent's core ability to parse queries and orchestrate computations. To address this, we introduce a novel evaluation methodology and benchmark designed to rigorously measure an LLM agent's reasoning for financial time-series analysis. We apply this methodology in a large-scale empirical study using our framework, Time Series Augmented Generation (TSAG), where an LLM agent delegates quantitative tasks to verifiable, external tools. Our benchmark, consisting of 100 financial questions, is used to compare multiple SOTA agents (e.g., GPT-4o, Llama 3, Qwen2) on metrics assessing tool selection accuracy, faithfulness, and hallucination. The results demonstrate that capable agents can achieve near-perfect tool-use accuracy with minimal hallucination, validating the tool-augmented paradigm. Our primary contribution is this evaluation framework and the corresponding empirical insights into agent performance, which we release publicly to foster standardized research on reliable financial AI.
Anton Kolonin, Alexey Glushchenko, Evgeny Bochkov +1
Apr 21, 2026cs.NE

Scalable Memristive-Friendly Reservoir Computing for Time Series Classification

Memristive devices present a promising foundation for next-generation information processing by combining memory and computation within a single physical substrate. This unique characteristic enables efficient, fast, and adaptive computing, particularly well suited for deep learning applications. Among recent developments, the memristive-friendly echo state network (MF-ESN) has emerged as a promising approach that combines memristive-inspired dynamics with the training simplicity of reservoir computing, where only the readout layer is learned. Building on this framework, we propose memristive-friendly parallelized reservoirs (MARS), a simplified yet more effective architecture that enables efficient scalable parallel computation and deeper model composition through novel subtractive skip connections. This design yields two key advantages: substantial training speedups of up to 21x over the inherently lightweight echo state network baseline and significantly improved predictive performance. Moreover, MARS demonstrates what is possible with parallel memristive-friendly reservoir computing: on several long sequence benchmarks our compact gradient-free models substantially outperform strong gradient-based sequence models such as LRU, S5, and Mamba, while reducing full training time from minutes or hours down seconds or even only a few hundred milliseconds. Our work positions parallel memristive-friendly computing as a promising route towards scalable neuromorphic learning systems that combine high predictive capability with radically improved computational efficiency, while providing a clear pathway to energy-efficient, low-latency implementations on emerging memristive and in-memory hardware.
Coşku Can Horuz, Andrea Ceni, Claudio Gallicchio +1
Apr 20, 2026cs.LG

Barrier-enforced multi-objective optimization for direct point and sharp interval forecasting

This paper proposes a multi-step probabilistic forecasting framework using a single neural-network based model to generate simultaneous point and interval forecasts. Our approach ensures non-crossing prediction intervals (PIs) through a model structure design that strictly satisfy a target coverage probability (PICP) while maximizing sharpness. Unlike existing methods that rely on manual weight tuning for scalarized loss functions, we treat point and PI forecasting as a multi-objective optimization problem, utilizing multi-gradient descent to adaptively select optimal weights. Key innovations include a new PI loss function based on an extended log-barrier with an adaptive hyperparameter to guarantee the coverage, a hybrid architecture featuring a shared temporal model with horizon-specific submodels, and a training strategy. The proposed loss is scale-independent and universally applicable; combined with our training algorithm, the framework eliminates trial-and-error hyperparameter tuning for balancing multiple objectives. Validated by an intra-day solar irradiance forecasting application, results demonstrate that our proposed loss consistently outperforms those in current literature by achieving target coverage with the narrowest PI widths. Furthermore, when compared against LSTM encoder-decoder and Transformer architectures--including those augmented with Chronos foundation models--our method remains highly competitive and can be seamlessly adapted to any deep learning structure.
Worachit Amnuaypongsa, Yotsapat Suparanonrat, Pana Wanitchollakit +1
Apr 20, 2026cs.LG

CAARL: In-Context Learning for Interpretable Co-Evolving Time Series Forecasting

In this paper we investigate forecasting coevolving time series that feature intricate dependencies and nonstationary dynamics by using an LLM Large Language Models approach We propose a novel modeling approach named ContextAware ARLLM CAARL that provides an interpretable framework to decode the contextual dynamics influencing changes in coevolving series CAARL decomposes time series into autoregressive segments constructs a temporal dependency graph and serializes this graph into a narrative to allow processing by LLM This design yields a chainofthoughtlike reasoning path where intermediate steps capture contextual dynamics and guide forecasts in a transparent manner By linking prediction to explicit reasoning traces CAARL enhances interpretability while maintaining accuracy Experiments on realworld datasets validate its effectiveness positioning CAARL as a competitive and interpretable alternative to stateoftheart forecasting methods
Etienne Tajeuna, Patrick Asante Owusu, Armelle Brun +1
Apr 20, 2026physics.ao-ph

Earth System Foundation Model (ESFM): A unified framework for heterogeneous data integration and forecasting

Foundation models (FMs) for the Earth system learn statistical relationships between physical variables across massive datasets to enable versatile downstream applications through finetuning, separating them from task-specific weather models. Here, we introduce Earth System Foundation Model (ESFM), a fully open model building on the 3D Swin UNet backbone of the pioneering Aurora model. ESFM introduces extensions that increase functionality and foster adoption in climate sciences. First, the encoding scheme and training protocols have been extended to handle diverse datasets, including those containing missing values across all spatio-temporal dimensions such as satellite data, as well as station data, all under one backbone. Axial attention is introduced to capture inter-variable dependencies. As a result ESFM skillfully predicts variables in regions or on pressure levels where no data is present at the initial time, while preserving inter-variable relationships, for example between temperature, pressure, and humidity. Individual variable tokenization enables different sets of variables to be shuffled during training and simplifies the process of building extensions for new downstream tasks. Adaptive layer norm-based ensembles allow for a simple yet effective way to transform deterministic ESFM to a probabilistic FM. We present findings using dense gridded data (ERA5, CMIP6), regionally masked dense data, sparse gridded MODIS satellite data, and station data. Results demonstrate competitive or superior performance relative to state-of-the-art benchmarks. Case studies of Super Typhoon Doksuri (2023) and 2024 sudden stratospheric warming events show accurate positional and magnitude estimations of extreme weather. ESFM retains the strengths of previous foundation models, such as long-term stability, but facilitates application to a variety of downstream tasks.
Firat Ozdemir, Yun Cheng, Salman Mohebi +11
Apr 20, 2026cs.LG

Causally-Constrained Probabilistic Forecasting for Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is a central challenge in industrial monitoring, as failures frequently arise from complex temporal dynamics and cross-sensor interactions. While recent deep learning models, including graph neural networks and Transformers, have demonstrated strong empirical performance, most approaches remain primarily correlational and offer limited support for causal interpretation and root-cause localization. This study introduces a causally-constrained probabilistic forecasting framework which is a Causally Guided Transformer (CGT) model for multivariate time-series anomaly detection, integrating an explicit time-lagged causal graph prior with deep sequence modeling. For each target variable, a dedicated forecasting block employs a hard parent mask derived from causal discovery to restrict the main prediction pathway to graph-supported causes, while a latent Gaussian head captures predictive uncertainty. To leverage residual correlational information without compromising the causal representation, a shadow auxiliary path with stop-gradient isolation and a safety-gated blending mechanism is incorporated to suppress non-causal contributions when reliability is low. Anomalies are identified using negative log-likelihood scores with adaptive streaming thresholding, and root-cause variables are determined through per-dimension probabilistic attribution and counterfactual clamping. Experiments on the ASD and SMD benchmarks indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, with F1-scores of 96.19% on ASD and 95.32% on SMD, and enhances variable-level attribution quality. These findings suggest that causal structural priors can improve both robustness and interpretability in detecting deep anomalies in multivariate sensor systems.
Pooyan Khosravinia, João Gama, Bruno Veloso
Apr 19, 2026cs.LG

Back to Repair: A Minimal Denoising Network for Time Series Anomaly Detection

We introduce JuRe (Just Repair), a minimal denoising network for time series anomaly detection that exposes a central finding: architectural complexity is unnecessary when the training objective correctly implements the manifold-projection principle. JuRe consists of a single depthwise-separable convolutional residual block with hidden dimension 128, trained to repair corrupted time series windows and scored at inference by a fixed, parameter-free structural discrepancy function. Despite using no attention, no latent variable, and no adversarial component, JuRe ranks second on the TSB-AD multivariate benchmark (AUC-PR 0.404, 180 series, 17 datasets) and second on the UCR univariate archive by AUC-PR (0.198, 250 series), leading all neural baselines on AUC-PR and VUS-PR. Component ablation on TSB-AD identifies training-time corruption as the dominant factor (ΔΔAUC-PR =0.047= 0.047 on removal), confirming that the denoising objective, not network capacity, drives detection quality. Pairwise Wilcoxon signed-rank tests establish statistical significance against 21 of 25 baselines on TSB-AD. Code is available at the URL https://github.com/iis-esslingen/JuRe.
Kadir-Kaan Özer, René Ebeling, Markus Enzweiler
Apr 19, 2026eess.SP

SPaRSe-TIME: Saliency-Projected Low-Rank Temporal Modeling for Efficient and Interpretable Time Series Prediction

Time series forecasting is traditionally dominated by sequence-based architectures such as recurrent neural networks and attention mechanisms, which process all time steps uniformly and often incur substantial computational cost. However, real-world temporal signals typically exhibit heterogeneous structure, where informative patterns are sparsely distributed and interspersed with redundant observations. This work introduces \textbf{SPaRSe-TIME}, a structured and computationally efficient framework that models time series through a decomposition into three complementary components: saliency, memory, and trend. The proposed approach reformulates temporal modeling as a projection onto informative subspaces, where saliency acts as a data-dependent sparsification operator, memory captures dominant low-rank temporal patterns, and trend encodes low-frequency dynamics. These components are integrated through a lightweight, adaptive mapping that enables simplified, selective, and interpretable temporal reasoning. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that SPaRSe-TIME achieves competitive predictive performance compared to recurrent and attention-based architectures, while significantly reducing computational complexity. The model is particularly effective in structured time series with clear temporal components and provides explicit interpretability through component-wise contributions. Furthermore, analysis reveals both the strengths and limitations of decomposition-based modeling, highlighting challenges in highly stochastic and complex multivariate settings. Overall, SPaRSe-TIME offers a principled alternative to monolithic sequence models, bridging efficiency, interpretability, and performance, and providing a scalable framework for time series learning.
K. A. Shahriar
Apr 19, 2026cs.AI

LLaTiSA: Towards Difficulty-Stratified Time Series Reasoning from Visual Perception to Semantics

Comprehensive understanding of time series remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Current research is hindered by fragmented task definitions and benchmarks with inherent ambiguities, precluding rigorous evaluation and the development of unified Time Series Reasoning Models(TSRMs). To bridge this gap, we formalize Time Series Reasoning (TSR) via a four-level taxonomy of increasing cognitive complexity. We introduce HiTSR, a hierarchical time series reasoning dataset comprising 83k samples with diverse task combinations and verified Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories. Leveraging HiTSR, we propose LLaTiSA, a strong TSRM that integrates visualized patterns with precision-calibrated numerical tables to enhance the temporal perception of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Through a multi-stage curriculum fine-tuning strategy, LLaTiSA achieves superior performance and exhibits robust out-of-distribution generalization across diverse TSR tasks and real-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/RainingNovember/LLaTiSA.
Yueyang Ding, HaoPeng Zhang, Rui Dai +4
Apr 18, 2026cs.LG

In-Context Learning Under Regime Change

Non-stationary sequences arise naturally in control, forecasting, and decision-making. The data-generating process shifts at unknown times, and models must detect the change, discard or downweight obsolete evidence, and adapt to new dynamics on the fly. Transformer-based foundation models increasingly rely on in-context learning for time series forecasting, tabular prediction, and continuous control. As these models are deployed in non-stationary environments, understanding their ability to detect and adapt to regime shifts is important. We formalize this as an in-context change-point detection problem and formally establish the existence of transformer models that solve this problem. Our construction demonstrates that model complexity, in layers and parameters, depends on the level of information available about the change-point location, from no knowledge to knowing exact timing. We validate our results with experiments on synthetic linear regression and linear dynamical systems, where trained transformers match the performance of optimal baselines across information levels. We also show that encoding and incorporating changepoint knowledge indeed improves the real-world performance of a pretrained foundation models on infectious disease forecasting and on financial volatility forecasting around Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements without retraining, demonstrating practical applicability to real-world regime changes.
Carson Dudley, Yutong Bi, Xiaofeng Liu +1
Apr 18, 2026cs.LG

Test-Time Adaptation for EEG Foundation Models: A Systematic Study under Real-World Distribution Shifts

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models have shown strong potential for learning generalizable representations from large-scale neural data, yet their clinical deployment is hindered by distribution shifts across clinical settings, devices, and populations. Test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a promising solution by enabling models to adapt to unlabeled target data during inference without access to source data, a valuable property in healthcare settings constrained by privacy regulations and limited labeled data. However, its effectiveness for EEG remains largely underexplored. In this work, we introduce NeuroAdapt-Bench, a systematic benchmark for evaluating test-time adaptation methods on EEG foundation models under realistic distribution shifts. We evaluate representative TTA approaches from other domains across multiple pretrained foundation models, diverse downstream tasks, and heterogeneous datasets spanning in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and extreme modality shifts (e.g., Ear-EEG). Our results show that standard TTA methods yield inconsistent gains and often degrade performance, with gradient-based approaches particularly prone to heavy degradation. In contrast, optimization-free methods demonstrate greater stability and more reliable improvements. These findings highlight the limitations of existing TTA techniques in EEG, provide guidance for future development, and underscore the need for domain-specific adaptation strategies.
Gabriel Jason Lee, Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Jimeng Sun
Apr 18, 2026stat.ML

Extraction of informative statistical features in the problem of forecasting time series generated by It{ô}-type processes

In this paper, we consider the problem of extraction of most informative features from time series that are regarded as observed values of stochastic processes satisfying the It{ô} stochastic differential equations with unknown random drift and diffusion coefficients. We do not attract any additional information and use only the information contained in the time series as it is. Therefore, as additional features, we use the parameters of statistically adjusted mixture-type models of the observed regularities of the behavior of the time series. Several algorithms of construction of these parameters are discussed. These algorithms are based on statistical reconstruction of the coefficients which, in turn, is based on statistical separation of normal mixtures. We obtain two types of parameters by the techniques of the uniform and non-uniform statistical reconstruction of the coefficients of the underlying It{ô} process. The reconstructed coefficients obtained by uniform techniques do not depend on the current value of the process, while the non-uniform techniques reconstruct the coefficients with the account of their dependence on the value of the process. Actually, the non-uniform techniques used in this paper represent a stochastic analog of the Taylor expansion for the time series. The efficiency of the obtained additional features is compared by using them in the autoregressive algorithms of prediction of time series. In order to obtain pure conclusion that is not affected by unwanted factors, say, related to a special choice of the architecture of the neural network prediction methods, we used only simple autoregressive algorithms. We show that the use of additional statistical features improves the prediction.
Victor Korolev, Mikhail Ivanov, Tatiana Kukanova +4
Apr 18, 2026eess.SP

TimeRFT: Stimulating Generalizable Time Series Forecasting for TSFMs via Reinforcement Finetuning

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) advance generalization and data efficiency in time series forecasting by unified large-scale pretraining. But TSFMs remain lacking when adapting to specific downstream forecasting tasks for two reasons. First, the non-stationary and uncertain nature of time series data lead to inevitable temporal distribution shifts between historical training and future testing data, while current Supervised FineTuning (SFT)-based methods are prone to overfitting and may degrade generalization. Second, training data availability varies across forecasting tasks, requiring TSFMs to generalize well under diverse data regimes. To address these challenges, we introduce the Time series Reinforcement Finetuning (TimeRFT) paradigm for TSFM downstream adaptation, which consists of two task-specific training recipes: i) A forecasting quality-based temporal reward mechanism that conducts a multi-faceted evaluation of the contribution of each prediction step to overall forecasting accuracy. ii) A forecasting difficulty-based data selection strategy to identify time series samples with generalizable predictive patterns and informative training signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate TimeRFT can consistently outperform SFT-based adaptation methods across various real-world forecasting tasks and training data regimes, enhancing prediction accuracy and generalization against unforeseen distribution shifts.
Siyang Li, Yize Chen, Zijie Zhu +4
Apr 18, 2026q-fin.ST

The CTLNet for Shanghai Composite Index Prediction

Shanghai Composite Index prediction has become a hot issue for many investors and academic researchers. Deep learning models are widely applied in multivariate time series forecasting, including recurrent neural networks (RNN), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and transformers. Specifically, the Transformer encoder, with its unique attention mechanism and parallel processing capabilities, has become an important tool in time series prediction, and has an advantage in dealing with long sequence dependencies and multivariate data correlations. Drawing on the strengths of various models, we propose the CNN-Transformer-LSTM Networks (CTLNet). This paper explores the application of CTLNet for Shanghai Composite Index prediction and the comparative experiments show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Haibin Jiao
Apr 17, 2026cs.CV

TriTS: Time Series Forecasting from a Multimodal Perspective

Time series forecasting plays a pivotal role in critical sectors such as finance, energy, transportation, and meteorology. However, Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF) remains a significant challenge because real-world signals contain highly entangled temporal dynamics that are difficult to fully capture from a purely 1D perspective. To break this representation bottleneck, we propose TriTS, a novel cross-modal disentanglement framework that projects 1D time series into orthogonal time, frequency, and 2D-vision spaces.To seamlessly bridge the 1D-to-2D modality gap without the prohibitive O(N2)O(N^2) computational overhead of Vision Transformers (ViTs), we introduce a Period-Aware Reshaping strategy and incorporate Visual Mamba (Vim). This approach efficiently models cross-period dependencies as global visual textures while maintaining linear computational complexity. Complementing this, we design a Multi-Resolution Wavelet Mixing (MR-WM) module for the frequency modality, which explicitly decouples non-stationary signals into trend and noise components to achieve fine-grained time-frequency localization. Finally, a streaming linear branch is retained in the time domain to anchor numerical stability. By dynamically fusing these three complementary representations, TriTS effectively adapts to diverse data contexts. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that TriTS achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, fundamentally outperforming existing vision-based forecasters by drastically reducing both parameter count and inference latency.
Xiang Ao
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

Chronax: A Jax Library for Univariate Statistical Forecasting and Conformal Inference

Time-series forecasting is central to many scientific and industrial domains, such as energy systems, climate modeling, finance, and retail. While forecasting methods have evolved from classical statistical models to automated, and neural approaches, the surrounding software ecosystem remains anchored to the traditional Python numerical stack. Existing libraries rely on interpreter-driven execution and object-oriented abstractions, limiting composability, large-scale parallelism, and integration with modern differentiable and accelerator-oriented workflows. Meanwhile, today's forecasting increasingly involves large collections of heterogeneous time series data, irregular covariates, and frequent retraining, placing new demands on scalability and execution efficiency. JAX offers an alternative paradigm to traditional stateful numerical computation frameworks based on pure functions and program transformations such as just-in-time compilation and automatic vectorization, enabling end-to-end optimization across CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs. However, this modern paradigm has not yet been fully incorporated into the design of forecasting systems. We introduce Chronax, a JAX-native time-series forecasting library that rethinks forecasting abstractions around functional purity, composable transformations, and accelerator-ready execution. By representing preprocessing, modeling, and multi-horizon prediction as pure JAX functions, Chronax enables scalable multi-series forecasting, model-agnostic conformal uncertainty quantification, and seamless integration with modern machine learning and scientific computing pipelines.
Xan Carey, Yash Deshmukh, Aileen Huang +7
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

Univariate Channel Fusion for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Multivariate time series classification (MTSC) plays a crucial role in various domains, including biomedical signal analysis and motion monitoring. However, existing approaches, particularly deep learning models, often require high computational resources, making them unsuitable for real-time applications or deployment on low-cost hardware, such as IoT devices and wearable systems. In this paper, we propose the Univariate Channel Fusion (UCF) method to deal with MTSC efficiently. UCF transforms multivariate time series into a univariate representation through simple channel fusion strategies such as the mean, median, or dynamic time warping barycenter. This transformation enables the use of any classifier originally designed for univariate time series, providing a flexible and computationally lightweight alternative to complex models. We evaluate UCF in five case studies covering diverse application domains, including chemical monitoring, brain-computer interfaces, and human activity analysis. The results demonstrate that UCF often outperforms baseline methods and state-of-the-art algorithms tailored for MTSC, while achieving substantial gains in computational efficiency, being particularly effective in problems with high inter-channel correlation.
Fernando Moro, Vinicius M. A. Souza
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

QuantSightBench: Evaluating LLM Quantitative Forecasting with Prediction Intervals

Forecasting has become a natural benchmark for reasoning under uncertainty. Yet existing evaluations of large language models remain limited to judgmental tasks in simple formats, such as binary or multiple-choice questions. In practice, however, forecasting spans a far broader scope. Across domains such as economics, public health, and social demographics, decisions hinge on numerical estimates over continuous quantities, a capability that current benchmarks do not capture. Evaluating such estimates requires a format that makes uncertainty explicit and testable. We propose prediction intervals as a natural and rigorous interface for this purpose. They demand scale awareness, internal consistency across confidence levels, and calibration over a continuum of outcomes, making them a more suitable evaluation format than point estimates for numerical forecasting. To assess this capability, we introduce a new benchmark QuantSightBench, and evaluate frontier models under multiple settings, assessing both empirical coverage and interval sharpness. Our results show that none of the 11 evaluated frontier and open-weight models achieves the 90% coverage target, with the top performers Gemini 3.1 Pro (79.1%), Grok 4 (76.4%), and GPT-5.4 (75.3%) all falling at least 10 percentage points short. Calibration degrades sharply at extreme magnitudes, revealing systematic overconfidence across all evaluated models.
Jeremy Qin, Maksym Andriushchenko
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

Modern Structure-Aware Simplicial Spatiotemporal Neural Network

Spatiotemporal modeling has evolved beyond simple time series analysis to become fundamental in structural time series analysis. While current research extensively employs graph neural networks (GNNs) for spatial feature extraction with notable success, these networks are limited to capturing only pairwise relationships, despite real-world networks containing richer topological relationships. Additionally, GNN-based models face computational challenges that scale with graph complexity, limiting their applicability to large networks. To address these limitations, we present Modern Structure-Aware Simplicial SpatioTemporal neural network (ModernSASST), the first approach to leverage simplicial complex structures for spatiotemporal modeling. Our method employs spatiotemporal random walks on high-dimensional simplicial complexes and integrates parallelizable Temporal Convolutional Networks to capture high-order topological structures while maintaining computational efficiency. Our source code is publicly available on GitHub\footnote{Code is available at: https://github.com/ComplexNetTSP/ST_RUM.
Zhaobo Hu, Vincent Gauthier, Mehdi Naima
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

Convolutionally Low-Rank Models with Modified Quantile Regression for Interval Time Series Forecasting

The quantification of uncertainty in prediction models is crucial for reliable decision-making, yet remains a significant challenge. Interval time series forecasting offers a principled solution to this problem by providing prediction intervals (PIs), which indicates the probability that the true value falls within the predicted range. We consider a recently established point forecasts (PFs) method termed Learning-Based Convolution Nuclear Norm Minimization (LbCNNM), which directly generates multi-step ahead forecasts by leveraging the convolutional low-rankness property derived from training data. While theoretically complete and empirically effective, LbCNNM lacks inherent uncertainty estimation capabilities, a limitation shared by many advanced forecasting methods. To resolve the issue, we modify the well-known Quantile Regression (QR) and integrate it into LbCNNM, resulting in a novel interval forecasting method termed LbCNNM with Modified Quantile Regression (LbCNNM-MQR). In addition, we devise interval calibration techniques to further improve the accuracy of PIs. Extensive experiments on over 100,000 real-world time series demonstrate the superior performance of LbCNNM-MQR.
Miaoxuan Zhu, Yi Yu, Yuyang Li +2
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

EVIL: Evolving Interpretable Algorithms for Zero-Shot Inference on Event Sequences and Time Series with LLMs

We introduce EVIL (\textbf{EV}olving \textbf{I}nterpretable algorithms with \textbf{L}LMs), an approach that uses LLM-guided evolutionary search to discover simple, interpretable algorithms for dynamical systems inference. Rather than training neural networks on large datasets, EVIL evolves pure Python/NumPy programs that perform zero-shot, in-context inference across datasets. We apply EVIL to three distinct tasks: next-event prediction in temporal point processes, rate matrix estimation for Markov jump processes, and time series imputation. In each case, a single evolved algorithm generalizes across all evaluation datasets without per-dataset training (analogous to an amortized inference model). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to show that LLM-guided program evolution can discover a single compact inference function for these dynamical-systems problems. Across the three domains, the discovered algorithms are often competitive with, and even outperform, state-of-the-art deep learning models while being orders of magnitudes faster, and remaining fully interpretable.
David Berghaus
Apr 17, 2026eess.SP

MedMamba: Recasting Mamba for Medical Time Series Classification

Medical time series, such as electrocardiograms (ECG) and electroencephalograms (EEG), exhibit complex temporal dynamics and structured cross-channel dependencies, posing fundamental challenges for automated analysis. Conventional convolutional and recurrent models struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Transformer-based approaches incur quadratic complexity and often introduce redundant interactions that are misaligned with the intrinsic structure of physiological signals. To address these limitations, we propose MedMamba, a principle-driven multi-scale bidirectional state space architecture tailored for medical time series classification. Our design is guided by three key inductive biases of physiological signals: spatial centralization, multi-timescale temporal composition, and non-causal contextual dependency. These principles are instantiated through a lightweight channel-mixing module for cross-channel reparameterization, multi-scale convolutional tokenization for temporal decomposition, and bidirectional Mamba blocks for efficient global context modeling with linear complexity. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets spanning EEG, ECG, and human activity signals demonstrate that MedMamba consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse modalities. Notably, it achieves 85.97% accuracy on PTB and establishes new state-of-the-art performance on the challenging ADFTD dataset (54.72% accuracy and 52.01% F1-score). Strong results on long-sequence benchmarks, such as SleepEDF, further validate its capability in modeling long-range dependencies. Moreover, MedMamba achieves a speedup of 4.6x in inference, highlighting its practicality for real-time clinical deployment. These results suggest that principle-guided state space modeling offers an effective and scalable alternative to Transformer-based approaches for medical time series analysis.
ZhengXiao He, Huayu Li, Xiwen Chen +4
Apr 16, 2026cs.LG

MambaSL: Exploring Single-Layer Mamba for Time Series Classification

Despite recent advances in state space models (SSMs) such as Mamba across various sequence domains, research on their standalone capacity for time series classification (TSC) has remained limited. We propose MambaSL, a framework that minimally redesigns the selective SSM and projection layers of a single-layer Mamba, guided by four TSC-specific hypotheses. To address benchmarking limitations -- restricted configurations, partial University of East Anglia (UEA) dataset coverage, and insufficiently reproducible setups -- we re-evaluate 20 strong baselines across all 30 UEA datasets under a unified protocol. As a result, MambaSL achieves state-of-the-art performance with statistically significant average improvements, while ensuring reproducibility via public checkpoints for all evaluated models. Together with visualizations, these results demonstrate the potential of Mamba-based architectures as a TSC backbone.
Yoo-Min Jung, Leekyung Kim
Apr 16, 2026cs.LG

Assessing the Performance-Efficiency Trade-off of Foundation Models in Probabilistic Electricity Price Forecasting

Large-scale renewable energy deployment introduces pronounced volatility into the electricity system, turning grid operation into a complex stochastic optimization problem. Accurate electricity price forecasting (EPF) is essential not only to support operational decisions, such as optimal bidding strategies and balancing power preparation, but also to reduce economic risk and improve market efficiency. Probabilistic forecasts are particularly valuable because they quantify uncertainty stemming from renewable intermittency, market coupling, and regulatory changes, enabling market participants to make informed decisions that minimize losses and optimize expected revenues. However, it remains an open question which models to employ to produce accurate forecasts. Should these be task-specific machine learning (ML) models or Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs)? In this work, we compare four models for day-ahead probabilistic EPF (PEPF) in European bidding zones: a deterministic NHITS backbone with Quantile-Regression Averaging (NHITS+QRA) and a conditional Normalizing-Flow forecaster (NF) are compared with two TSFMs, namely Moirai and ChronosX. On the one hand, we find that TSFMs outperform task-specific deep learning models trained from scratch in terms of CRPS, Energy Score, and predictive interval calibration across market conditions. On the other hand, we find that well-configured task-specific models, particularly NHITS combined with QRA, achieve performance very close to TSFMs, and in some scenarios, such as when supplied with additional informative feature groups or adapted via few-shot learning from other European markets, they can even surpass TSFMs. Overall, our findings show that while TSFMs offer expressive modeling capabilities, conventional models remain highly competitive, emphasizing the need to weigh computational expense against marginal performance improvements in PEPF.
Jan Niklas Lettner, Hadeer El Ashhab, Veit Hagenmeyer +1
Apr 14, 2026cs.AI

Fun-TSG: A Function-Driven Multivariate Time Series Generator with Variable-Level Anomaly Labeling

Reliable evaluation of anomaly detection methods in multivariate time series remains an open challenge, largely due to the limitations of existing benchmark datasets. Current resources often lack fine-grained anomaly annotations, do not provide explicit intervariable and temporal dependencies, and offer little insight into the underlying generative mechanisms. These shortcomings hinder the development and rigorous comparison of detection models, especially those targeting interpretable and variable-specific outputs. To address this gap, we introduce Fun-TSG, a fully customizable time series generator designed to support high-quality evaluation of anomaly detection systems. Our tool enables both fully automated generation, based on randomly sampled dependency structures and anomaly types, and manual generation through user-defined equations and anomaly configurations. In both cases, it provides full transparency over the data generation process, including access to ground-truth anomaly labels at the variable and timestamp levels. Fun-TSG supports the creation of diverse, interpretable, and reproducible benchmarking scenarios, enabling fine-grained performance analysis for both classical and modern anomaly detection models.
Pierre Lotte, André Péninou, Olivier Teste
Apr 10, 2026cs.LG

Sliding-Window Reordering with Overlap Averaging: A Simple Time-Domain Augmentation for Multivariate Forecasting

Augmentation has become a central technique for improving deep forecasting models, but classification-style transformations tend to break the coherence between the look-back window and its continuous future target. We describe a simple procedure that unfolds the joint input-target sequence into overlapping sliding windows, randomly reorders a controlled fraction of them-prioritized by a lightweight variance criterion-and reconstructs the sequence by averaging across the overlaps, producing synthetic samples with controlled variation while limiting temporal distortion. The procedure is model-agnostic, introduces only three interpretable hyperparameters, and achieves strong improvements over a comprehensive set of competing augmentations across nine long-term forecasting benchmarks with five backbone families (TSMixer, DLinear, PatchTST, TiDE, LightTS) and four short-term traffic benchmarks with PatchTST. Component-wise ablations, hyperparameter sensitivity studies, distributional-alignment diagnostics, probabilistic forecasting evaluation, and a transfer experiment to univariate and multivariate time series classification clarify the contribution of each design choice.
Jafar Bakhshaliyev, Johannes Burchert, Niels Landwehr +1
Apr 7, 2026cs.LG

Channel-wise Retrieval for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting often struggles to capture long-range dependencies due to fixed lookback windows. Retrieval-augmented forecasting addresses this by retrieving historical segments from memory, but existing approaches rely on a channel-agnostic strategy that applies the same references to all variables. This neglects inter-variable heterogeneity, where different channels exhibit distinct periodicities and spectral profiles. We propose CRAFT (Channel-wise retrieval-augmented forecasting), a novel framework that performs retrieval independently for each channel. To ensure efficiency, CRAFT adopts a two-stage pipeline: a sparse relation graph constructed in the time domain prunes irrelevant candidates, and spectral similarity in the frequency domain ranks references, emphasizing dominant periodic components while suppressing noise. Experiments on seven public benchmarks demonstrate that CRAFT outperforms state-of-the-art forecasting baselines, achieving superior accuracy with practical inference efficiency.
Junhyeok Kang, Jun Seo, Soyeon Park +4
Mar 23, 2026cs.LG

A Foundation Model for Instruction-Conditioned In-Context Time Series Tasks

In-context learning (ICL) enables task adaptation at inference time by conditioning on demonstrations rather than updating model parameters. Although recent time-series foundation models incorporate contextual conditioning, retrieval, or example-based prompting, they typically rely on implicit positional structure or task-specific objectives rather than explicit instruction-conditioned input-output demonstrations. We introduce iAmTime, a time-series foundation model trained with instruction-conditioned amortized meta-learning to infer tasks directly from example demonstrations. iAmTime represents each episode as a structured prompt over historical context and future-known variables using specialized semantic tokens that attend to designated time-series regions, exchange information across demonstrations, and inject task information into the query representation. The model combines a Hierarchical Multi-Scope Transformer Encoder, which captures temporal and covariate dynamics while inferring latent task structure from demonstrated input-output mappings, with a Task-Conditioned Patch Decoder, which adapts decoding through expert-based routing. We train iAmTime on large-scale real and synthetic corpora using supervised and self-supervised instruction-conditioned tasks, including forecasting, imputation, reconstruction, classification, anomaly detection, and source de-mixing. Across diverse domains, frequencies, and horizons, iAmTime improves zero-shot adaptation over strong time-series foundation baselines on probabilistic and point forecasting benchmarks, while achieving competitive or superior performance on four non-forecasting tasks.
Anish Saha, Konstantin Shmakov