Time Series

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12 papers in the last 28 days · 0.2% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-21

3 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Time Series.

Period ending 2026-09-14

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Time Series.

Period ending 2026-09-07

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Time Series.

256 papers

Latest in Time Series

Sep 20, 2026cs.LG

ITSY: Causal Discovery From Irregular Time-Series Data

Structural causal models for time series recover contemporaneous and lagged effects, but most methods require complete observation windows and become misspecified when samples are missing. We introduce ITSY, the first continuous-optimization method for causal discovery from irregular time series under a linear model. ITSY reformulates the structural equation so that prediction uses the nearest available history rather than the possibly missing current slice, and jointly imputes missing values while learning both graphs. A weighted reconstruction objective corrects the noise transformation induced by this reformulation. Across synthetic regimes varying missingness, scale, graph density, and noise, and on a real world benchmark, ITSY consistently improves graph recovery over representative SCM-based baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results establish a focused solution for irregular linear first-order dynamics and clarify the assumptions required for nonlinear or higher-order extensions.
Wenbo Xu, Yue He, Yunhai Wang +2
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Multi-source Transfer Learning of Time Series with a Shapelet-based Distance Measure

Transfer learning is an effective technique for addressing data scarcity in deep learning for time series classification, but its success depends on the selection of source datasets. Conventional transferability estimation methods are often computationally expensive, as they require fully pre-training a model on each potential source dataset to assess its suitability. This paper introduces a novel, training-free source selection method named Shapelet Matching. Our approach first identifies discriminative shapelets from the target and potential source datasets. Then, Shapelet Matching quantifies dataset similarity by comparing the extracted sets of shapelets. To mitigate the risk of negative transfer from selecting an unsuitable single source, we introduce a multi-source transfer learning method. We select several source datasets based on their shapelet-based similarity scores, combine them into a single multi-source dataset, and use this aggregated dataset for pre-training. The model is then fine-tuned on the target task. We evaluated our method on 128 datasets from the UCR Archive using both temporal CNN and Transformer architectures. The empirical results demonstrate that our multi-source pre-training reduces the risk of negative transfer on average. Shapelet Matching achieves the strongest performance for the CNN backbone and remains competitive for patch-based Transformer architectures, while avoiding the cost of pre-training a separate model for every candidate source.
Jiseok Lee, Brian Kenji Iwana
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Numerical Time Series: A Unified Benchmark for Multimodal Forecasting with Heterogeneous Context

Most time series forecasting benchmarks remain numerical-centric and provide limited support for evaluating contextual information that shapes real-world temporal dynamics. Existing multimodal benchmarks also suffer from limited data and context coverage, fragmented evaluation settings, and overreliance on aggregate evaluation. In this paper, we propose \textbf{MUSE-Bench}, a unified benchmark for multimodal time series forecasting with heterogeneous context. It comprises fourteen datasets across eight domains and six types of context: metadata, events, holidays, news, images, and numerical covariates. We evaluate diverse forecasting paradigms, including statistical, data-specific, foundation, multimodal, and general-purpose LLM forecasting methods under shared non-overlapping forecast windows, common target observations, and consistent point and probabilistic metrics. Extensive experiments yield three main findings. First, numerical time series foundation models dominate the overall ranking, while Aurora, the evaluated multimodal foundation model, trails the leading numerical TSFMs but outperforms all evaluated data-specific models. Second, ablations show that external context improves the four evaluated context-aware models, whereas incorrect or temporally misaligned context degrades performance. Third, general-purpose LLMs perform poorly as direct forecasters, and LLM-guided refinement does not yield consistent improvements. MUSE-Bench enables systematic evaluation of how forecasting models utilize context and provides a foundation for future multimodal forecasting research.
Peng Chen, Zhihao Zhuang, Hongzhou Chen +6
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Explaining Time Series Forecasting with Horizon-Resolved Attribution

Recent advances in explaining time series (TS) models have produced methods that identify which past values a prediction depends on. However, most existing methods return a single importance vector, assuming that every predicted step depends on the same past values. In this paper, we show that this assumption does not hold, as different forecast steps depend on different past values. Motivated by this observation, we propose Horizon-Resolved eXplanation (HRX), which adds a horizon axis to the explanation, so that every forecast step receives its own importance map. HRX is a simple yet effective plug-in framework with three components: 1) an estimator that reads these maps out of any differentiable forecaster without modifying the TS backbone, 2) an evaluation protocol that validates the horizon axis by measuring how much a single forecast step changes when the inputs an importance map ranks highest are removed, and 3) a rank criterion that predicts in advance whether the axis is worth resolving on a given TS. We further show that this step-wise dependence is low-dimensional, as the explanations of all steps are built from a few shared maps whose number does not grow with the forecast length. Extensive experiments across various backbones and datasets show that the improvement comes from the horizon axis and holds for estimators of previous explanation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/HRX.
Seunghan Lee, Jun Seo, Jaehoon Lee +9
Sep 11, 2026cs.LG

Bidirectional Multimodal Fusion of Sky Images and Time-Series for Solar Forecasting with Large Language Models

Short-term photovoltaic (PV) power and global horizontal irradiance (GHI) forecasts are essential for effective dispatch, reserve scheduling, and grid operations. At these forecasting horizons, errors are predominantly driven by cloud induced ramps: relying solely on historical numerical data may struggle to anticipate an incoming cloud, making ground-based sky images a crucial complementary physical signal. Furthermore, forecast performance is highly sensitive to location and local observing conditions, creating a strong need for site-specific data that are often scarce. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated competitive performance and high data efficiency in time-series forecasting. Despite their success, existing LLM-based forecasting methods remain predominantly unimodal, relying primarily on historical numerical time-series data. Effectively incorporating sky imagery into an LLM-based forecasting framework remains under-explored and an open challenge. In this paper, we propose SolCloudLLM, an LLM-based multimodal forecasting framework. SolCloudLLM aligns sky-image patches with time-series patches and fuses their corresponding representations through bidirectional multimodal fusion, yielding a unified representation that is subsequently mapped into the embedding space of an LLM. Extensive experiments on the SIRTA and SKIPP'D datasets demonstrate that SolCloudLLM consistently outperforms the best baseline methods in MSE across all forecasting horizons, achieving a maximum relative MSE reduction of 25.4%. Stratified analysis further indicates that the benefits of multimodal fusion are concentrated primarily under cloudy conditions. Notably, SolCloudLLM achieves the best performance in nearly all few-shot settings, whereas other deep learning baselines experience substantial performance degradation and are frequently outperformed by the non-learning physical method.
Ken Chen, Maneesha Perera, Wei Wang +3
Sep 9, 2026eess.SP

Deep Learning-Based Detection of Electrical Faults and Power Quality Disturbances in Aerospace Power Systems

More Electric Aircraft require fast and reliable monitoring of high-frequency electrical networks, yet most power quality disturbance and fault diagnosis methods are developed for conventional 50 or 60 Hz grids. This work presents a hardware-aware deep learning framework for multiclass detection of electrical faults and power quality disturbances in a 400 Hz aerospace power system. A high-fidelity simulation model inspired by the Boeing 787 electrical architecture generates voltage and current waveforms for 21 normal, disturbance, switching, open-circuit, and short-circuit conditions. Two datasets, each containing 73,500 samples, are formed from one-dimensional time-series signals and short-time Fourier transform time-frequency representations. Signal-processing augmentation, domain randomization, and class-specific generative adversarial networks increase waveform diversity, and the time-series dataset is released through IEEE DataPort. We compare 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks, long short-term memory networks, CNN-LSTM hybrids, ResNet, MobileNet, and VGG models under common training conditions. A compact ResNet provides the best accuracy-complexity tradeoff, achieving 96.94 percent software test accuracy with 175,685 parameters. After 8-bit quantization and deployment on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale Plus MPSoC ZCU102, the model achieves 95.87 percent accuracy and a measured mean neural-network accelerator latency of 6.90 ms per input record. The results establish simulation-based, accelerator-level feasibility for embedded edge AI in aircraft electrical health monitoring and motivate future end-to-end data acquisition and experimental validation.
Ian C. Guzmán, Radu Babiceanu, Berker Peköz
Sep 7, 2026cs.RO

A Multimodal Label Forecasting Method for Aperiodic Visuo-Motor Time Series

Deep learning models have been increasingly applied to Time Series Forecasting (TSF) in recent years. Transformer-based and MLP-based models have both been used effectively on many real-world TSF regression benchmarks, and there is ongoing debate as to which family of methods is best. While these benchmarks have drawn much attention, it is also worth noting that many current datasets and methods assume approximate periodicity in the time series. In this work, we focus on a new TSF task without periodicity: anticipating falls during humanoid locomotion, on the basis of egocentric vision and proprioception. When the locomotion trajectories are sufficiently diverse, periodicity is violated. We contribute two new benchmark datasets (one from simulation, one from real hardware), showing that periodicity is violated and recent deep TSF methods struggle on these benchmarks. We also propose a novel deep learning architecture that exploits both endogenous and exogenous variables and a training process that rigorously enforces i.i.d sampling of training examples. Our results show statistically significant improvement over prior art in multiple experimental conditions, by 12.73% or more on the real data and 10.40% or more on the simulation data. Code and datasets will be available upon acceptance.
Borui He, Garrett E Katz
Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

RATL: Learning from Retrieved Residuals for Robust Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) complements parametric models with retrieved external evidence. The same idea is attractive for continuous-output regression, but directly reusing retrieved target values is often not robust when samples differ in output level, numerical scale, or local dynamics. Moreover, conventional forecasting pipelines generally use residuals for model optimization and error diagnosis, but do not retain individual historical residual examples as memory that can be accessed at inference time.For multivariate time-series forecasting, we propose RATL, a plug-in residual-retrieval and feedback-correction method. RATL freezes a base forecaster to construct retrieval keys and turns its historical forecast residuals into a train-only memory specific to that base model. At inference time, RATL retrieves residual trajectories from similar historical contexts subject to causal availability constraints, then uses a set-aware router operating over forecast blocks and variables to select and combine these trajectories. Experiments show that historical residuals matched to the current context contain reusable forecasting information and that RATL improves frozen base forecasters in most experimental settings. Ablations further show that learned routing strengthens raw residual feedback, while validation-based correction-strength selection limits residual over-injection.On real-world benchmarks, we use iTransformer as the primary frozen base forecaster, compare against multiple strong forecasting baselines, and test transferability across backbones. The results show that RATL can further improve base-forecaster performance in most settings.Overall, RATL shifts the retrieved object from historical target values to base-model-specific historical forecast errors, providing a plug-in, residual-memory-based paradigm for learned feedback correction in continuous-output forecasting.
Yuchen He, Yueyang Cang, Zhiyuan Ning +2
Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

Neural-Network Maxent: a general extension with learned nonlinearity, applied to time-series for Desert Locust distribution modelling

Species Distribution Modelling (SDM) is essential for understanding how environmental conditions shape biodiversity, particularly for destructive pests such as the Desert Locust (Schistocerca gregaria), whose breeding dynamics are tightly coupled to rapidly evolving environmental conditions. Maxent has become the dominant method for presence-only data, but its reliance on a linear combination of hand chosen feature transforms limits its ability to capture the nonlinear, temporal relationships common in ecological monitoring, where covariates such as precipitation, soil moisture, and vegetation indices evolve meaningfully over time. Standard implementations flatten time-series covariates into independent features, discarding sequential structure that carries critical signal. We introduce RNN Maxent, an extension of the Maxent framework that replaces the fixed feature dictionary with a neural network, specifically a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), trained end to end via backpropagation. The approach preserves Maxent's presence only statistical foundations, background normalization, and probability calibration, differing only in that the nonlinearity is learned from data rather than fixed in advance. We apply RNN Maxent to map suitable habitat for the Desert Locust using 50 day environmental time series derived from ERA5 Land, MODIS, and Sentinel 3, maintaining a 7 day gap between covariates and presence records to yield forecasting behavior. Compared against standard Maxent, RNN Maxent improves performance across metrics (ROC AUC 0.862 std 0.036 vs. 0.792; F1 0.671 std 0.056 vs. 0.590).
Alessandro Grassi, Edoardo Kimani Bellotto, Wassim El Azami +2
Sep 1, 2026cs.LG

Poisson-Gamma Dynamical Systems with Time-varying Transition Dynamics

Bayesian methodologies for handling count-valued time series have gained prominence due to their ability to infer interpretable latent structures and to estimate uncertainties. Among these Bayesian models, Poisson-Gamma Dynamical Systems (PGDSs) are proven to be effective in capturing the evolving dynamics underlying observed count sequences. However, the state-of-the-art PGDS still falls short in capturing the transition dynamics that are commonly observed in real-world count time series. To mitigate this limitation, a PGDS with time-varying transition kernel (TV-PGDS), is proposed to allow the underlying transition matrices to evolve over time. Three specifically-designed Dirichlet Markov chains (Dir-Dir, Dir-Gam-Dir, PR-Gam-Dir) are constructed to accommodate heterogeneous structural mutations within these dependencies. Leveraging Dirichlet-Multinomial-Beta data augmentation techniques, a fully-conjugate and efficient Gibbs sampler is developed to perform posterior simulation. Experiments show that, in comparison with related models, the proposed PGDS achieves improved predictive performance due to its capacity to learn time-varying dependency structure captured by the time-evolving transition matrices.
Jiahao Wang, Yijun Wang, Nan Fang +1
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

TSPFN: A Temporal Tabular Foundation Model for Physiological Time Series Classification

Designing models that generalize effectively in low- to medium-data regimes remains a primary challenge in medical machine learning, particularly for physiological time-series classification. While tabular foundation models such as TabPFN offer an attractive alternative to conventional fine-tuning through in-context learning, they are not designed to capture the temporal dependencies inherent to physiological signals. ~In this paper, we introduce TSPFN, a foundation model that redesigns TabPFN's architecture for time series data. TSPFN integrates structured temporal representations and positional embeddings to capture intra-sample temporal and channel dependencies. To fully leverage its spatio-temporal design, the model is pretrained on 140,000 real-world physiological time series across multiple medical domains. This yields a unified, generalizable framework capable of learning the specificities of medical time series. Experiments across diverse physiological benchmarks demonstrate that TSPFN consistently outperforms standard tabular baselines and TabPFN, and achieves superior cross-domain generalization compared to specialized deep time-series models. All our experiments, ablation studies, and pre-processing scheme are publicly available at https://github.com/Jeremstym/TSPFN
Jérémie Stym-Popper, Clément Rambour, Federica Granese +2
Aug 31, 2026cs.HC

TSExplorer: An interactive data annotation and exploration tool for time-series data

We present TSExplorer, a cross-platform tool for interactive annotation and exploration of time-series data. The tool enables users to inspect high-dimensional datasets through multiple complementary 2D visualizations derived from high-dimensional feature representations. TSExplorer is designed as a general-purpose research tool supporting a wide range of workflows, including exploratory data analysis, annotation of unlabeled or partially-labeled datasets, comparison of feature representations, and post-hoc inspection and refinement of existing labels with interactive visual feedback.
Einari Vaaras, Manu Airaksinen, Okko Räsänen
Aug 13, 2026cs.LG

Into the ORBIT for Time Series: Training Regimes for Foundation Models

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have advanced primarily through architectural innovation, while training regimes for large-scale heterogeneous corpora remain under-explored. As a result, pre-training distributions are often poorly controlled with respect to domain imbalance, context requirements, prediction horizons, and missingness. We introduce ORBIT (Omni-Range Bootstrap Incremental Training), a training paradigm that makes this distribution explicit and controllable. ORBIT combines Bootstrap Multi-Level Sampling, which controls dataset exposure and samples records, target variables, context windows, and prediction horizons, with Omni-Range Incremental Training, which varies context lengths and prediction horizons throughout a single training stage. Under ORBIT, we train Falcon-2.0, a simple univariate encoder-only Transformer with missingness-aware triple-channel patch tokenization and parallel patch prediction. We further introduce Rank-Guided Cross-Depth Alignment, a training objective that uses late-layer representations as stop-gradient teachers for shallow layers without additional inference cost. Evaluations on GIFT-Eval and fev-bench demonstrate strong zero-shot forecasting performance across diverse domains and frequencies.
Hongjie Xia, Yiding Liu, Yifan Hu +2
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

GENADA: efficient generative time series adversarial attack framework

Deep learning models are widely used for time series analysis in domains such as healthcare, finance, energy systems, and environmental monitoring. However, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where small input perturbations cause severe degradation in predictive performance. Commonly used gradient-based attacks, iterative first-order methods, are computationally burdensome, as they repeatedly backpropagate through the victim model to compute input gradients during a number of iterative refinement steps. We propose a GENerative ADversarial Attack (GENADA) that learns a generative model to produce deceptive perturbations directly in a single forward pass and a procedure to train it. Variants include single-step and iterative generative attack schemes. The validation considers attacks on several neural models and datasets in the time-series domain, a controlled, low-dimensional setting. Empirically, GENADA achieves comparable attack quality to strong baselines while requiring less time to generate perturbations during inference.
Michael Baronov, Denis Vorobev, Margarita Rusanova +2
Aug 12, 2026cs.CL

LabelFusion-TS: Fusing Large Language Models, Transformer Encoders, and Financial Time Series for Monetary-Policy Stance Classification

Financial text is produced and interpreted within a market environment, yet financial text classifiers almost always receive text alone. We study whether financial time series are useful as an additional input on the task of classifying sentences from Federal Reserve communication as hawkish, dovish, or neutral. Our system, \lfts{}, extends the \lf{} architecture with this modality: a small voting network combines three independently trained components, a fine-tuned RoBERTa encoder, a prompted large language model (LLM), and a fused ensemble of time-series transformers over the market series of the months preceding publication. Because only about a thousand annotated sentences are available for training, the RoBERTa encoder is first pre-trained on sentences annotated automatically by the LLM and only then fine-tuned on the human labels. Trained on Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) communication up to 2015 and evaluated on 2015--2022, the fused system achieves 70.2% weighted F1 -- against 64.1% for the zero-shot LLM -- and overtakes it with as few as 240 human-labelled sentences. We take this as initial evidence for market time series as an input modality in financial text classification.
Michael Schlee, Fabian Lukassen, Christoph Weisser
Aug 11, 2026cs.LG

Retrieval-Corrected Conformal Prediction for Time Series

Conformal prediction (CP) provides distribution-free prediction intervals for fixed forecasters, but its standard calibration procedure is often inefficient for time series data, where forecast errors are temporally dependent and change across time and operating conditions. Recent time series CP methods improve local calibration using recent, weighted, or localized residuals. Yet local calibration can remain indirect, since broad residual weighting or additional adaptation procedures may dilute the evidence most relevant to the current prediction. This motivates a simple retrieval and correction strategy that selects similar past residuals as local evidence and then corrects the coverage error left by retrieval. In this paper, we propose Retrieval--Corrected Conformal Prediction (RCCP), a retrieval-augmented calibration method for time series prediction intervals. RCCP builds an asymmetric interval from retrieved one-sided residuals and calibrates its normalized retrieval error with a scalar conformal correction. Thus, retrieval provides local residual evidence, while conformal correction determines the final scale needed for coverage. We provide a coverage-gap bound based on the stability of the normalized retrieval error distribution. Across standard benchmarks and backbone forecasters, RCCP attains the target coverage in every setting and achieves the lowest Winkler scores, with fewer severe misses. RCCP also achieves low calibration and inference overhead, showing that retrieval-corrected calibration is an effective and scalable approach to uncertainty quantification in time series forecasting. Code is available at https://github.com/jinsaaang/rccp.
Sangjin Jin, Kangmin Kim, Junhyeong Lee +1
Aug 10, 2026cs.LG

REATS: LLM Reasoning-based Ensemble Learning for Adaptive Time Series Forecasting

Due to the diversity of real-world time series, no single forecasting model consistently dominates across all samples. Ensemble learning addresses this by combining complementary model strengths, yet existing methods rely on fixed rules or black-box models based solely on numerical inputs, failing to leverage LLM reasoning for interpretable weighting decisions. We propose REATS, which leverages LLM reasoning capabilities as an intelligent ensemble router that jointly processes textual temporal pattern descriptions and numerical features to produce interpretable, sample-adaptive ensemble weights through chain-of-thought reasoning. To enable effective LLM-based ensembling, we study its key design choices and propose: (i) a structured input pipeline that transforms raw time series into hybrid textual--numerical representations with fixed token cost, enabling rule-based chain-of-thought construction without API dependency, augmented with retrieved similar-sample priors; (ii) a diverse multi-row weight supervision scheme coupled with a token-efficient percentage-table format that reduces numerical complexity and mitigates LLM hallucinations; and (iii) a two-stage fine-tuning framework combining SFT with GRPO, where a reciprocal reward mapping transforms the continuous unbounded MSE gap into bounded signals with amplified near-oracle sensitivity, addressing the uniform sensitivity and outlier-dominated advantage compression inherent in naive reward designs for regression-based GRPO. Experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate that REATS outperforms competitive ensemble baselines while providing natural language explanations and demonstrating strong transfer learning and out-of-domain generalization to unseen candidate models.
Xu Zhang, Chang Xu, Hui Sun +5
Aug 10, 2026cs.LG

LITEWAY: LIghtweight HAR via Temporal Efficient highWAY

Wearable human activity recognition (HAR) remains challenging due to the computational and energy constraints of deep learning models on resource-limited devices. Existing lightweight approaches often rely on recurrent architectures (e.g., GRU and LSTM), limiting parallelism and increasing inference latency. We propose LITEWAY, a modality-agnostic, fully convolutional framework for multichannel sensor time series that replaces recurrent temporal modeling with structured convolutional decomposition. LITEWAY combines lightweight convolutional blocks, strided temporal processing, and convolution-attention pooling to efficiently capture temporal dependencies while reducing computational complexity. We evaluate LITEWAY on 16 HAR datasets against TinyHAR, TinierHAR, and MLP-HAR. LITEWAY achieves competitive macro F1 while reducing model size by 4.06x-9.52x (Light) and 3.87x-9.07x (Full) compared with TinyHAR and TinierHAR. Deployment experiments further show energy reductions of 2.29x-3.14x (Light) and 1.46x-2.01x (Full) compared with TinierHAR and MLP-HAR, highlighting efficient fully convolutional temporal modeling for wearable HAR. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/dominique-nshimyimana/liteway.
Dominique Nshimyimana, Vitor Fortes Rey, Mengxi Liu +2
Aug 8, 2026cs.LG

TSDS-Toolbox: A Toolbox for Measuring Time-Series Dataset Similarity

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly accelerated research in time-series analysis, particularly in forecasting, classification, and generation tasks. Recent models, especially foundation models, benefit from time-series dataset similarity due to its significant role in source dataset selection for fine-tuning. However, many existing implementations for benchmarking time-series dataset similarity methods are fragmented and difficult to extend. To address this, we present a unified framework, the Time-Series Dataset Similarity Toolbox (TSDS-Toolbox). Our work enables (1) systematic and reproducible comparisons of time-series dataset similarity methods; (2) flexible extensibility for users to add customized datasets, similarity methods, and downstream time-series tasks; and (3) consistent evaluation of both dataset-level and series-level similarity methods through integrated time-series dataset reducers. The effectiveness of TSDS-Toolbox is validated through comprehensive experiments under diverse experimental settings. Our toolbox is publicly available.
Yen-Ku Liu, Hongjie Chen, Ryan A. Rossi +1
Aug 7, 2026cs.LG

PhysAttNet: Enhancing Predictive Performance in Industrial and Astrophysical Time Series via Physics-Informed Attention

Accurate and robust time series forecasting is essential in many applications involving physical processes, such as manufacturing monitoring and astrophysical event detection. In these settings, predictive models must remain reliable under noise, variability, and measurement uncertainty while capturing temporally localized structures corresponding to physically meaningful events. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used for such tasks due to their computational efficiency and strong representational capacity. However, their learned temporal representations often exhibit unstable or physically inconsistent attention patterns, reducing robustness, generalization, and interpretability. This paper introduces PhysAttNet, a physics-informed attention framework for time series forecasting. PhysAttNet augments a lightweight CNN forecaster with an attention head guided by domain-informed regularization reflecting the structural properties of physical signals. Specifically, three complementary constraints are imposed during training: an alignment regularization that encourages attention to follow smooth, peak-centered temporal structures derived from the input signal, a smoothness regularization that enforces continuous temporal evolution, and a sparsity regularization that promotes selective focus on informative intervals. These differentiable regularization terms introduce physics-guided inductive bias without requiring annotated explanations or manual supervision. Experiments on two distinct applications, namely predicting cutting forces during milling and forecasting flares in blazar time series, demonstrate that PhysAttNet improves forecasting accuracy, generalization, and prediction performance on structurally important events.
Amal Saadallah, Julia Tjus, Petra Wiederkeher +1
Aug 7, 2026cs.LG

When GNNs Fail: Quantifying and Overcoming Temporal Correlation Volatility in Time Series

Modeling multivariate time series by representing them as graphs, where individual series act as nodes and pairwise temporal corre- lations serve as edges, has gained significant traction. Recent advances in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong perfor- mance by assuming a static graph topology and aggregating information from neighboring series. In this work, we investigate the representa- tional power of GNNs for forecasting under both static and dynamic settings (i.e., when pairwise correlations evolve drastically over time) and identify critical limitations in current architectures. To formalize this, we first propose Temporal Correlation Volatility (TCV), a model- agnostic metric designed to quantify the distributional evolution of these latent structures. We establish a clear connection between TCV and performance degradation, demonstrating that many popular models, including Transformers, generalize poorly in high-TCV settings and are often outperformed by simple structure-agnostic baselines. To address these limitations, we propose Graph Layer for Inference in Dynamic En- vironments (GLIDE), a novel GNN layer enhanced by two theoretically grounded design mechanisms: (D1) Path-based Message Passing, which captures path-based neighborhoods and (D2) Static and Dynamic Propagation Separation, which identifies optimal dynamics via local static approximation. These components significantly improve learning under dynamic topology while preserving robustness in static scenarios. Ex- tensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that GLIDE improves average performance by up to 45.6% across static and dynamic settings, with the largest gain reaching 85.7%. The source code is available at https://github.com/ChenS676/GLIDE.
Chen Shao, Yue Wang, Zhenyi Zhu +4
Aug 7, 2026cs.LG

Accounting Graph Transformer for Short-History Multi-KPI Forecasting in Small Businesses

Small businesses often have only 12-24 months of accounting history, yet planning and risk workflows require coordinated forecasts across financial statements. We study joint 12-month forecasting of 13 income-statement, balance-sheet, cash-flow, and working-capital key performance indicators (KPIs) from 71 monthly ledger series. We introduce the Accounting Graph Transformer (AGT), which represents each ledger series as a masked token, exchanges information through typed attention on a fixed accounting-relation graph, pools target-specific context, and fuses it with a gated three-month recency path. Across 11,993 forecast origins from 1,060 unseen companies, AGT achieves sample-weighted KPI-macro mean absolute error (MAE) 0.6990±0.00130.6990 \pm 0.0013 over three independent seeds, compared with 0.7378±0.00140.7378 \pm 0.0014 for the strongest baseline, LightGBM. At the pre-specified seed 42, a paired company-clustered bootstrap gives a LightGBM-minus-AGT difference of 0.0395 with 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.0350,0.0439][0.0350,0.0439]. AGT is best on all 13 KPIs against LightGBM, TimeMixer, and SOFTS in the matched seed-42 comparison, while final-architecture ablations show that relational attention, accounting topology, and the recency path each improve validation and test accuracy. On 7,094 additional unseen companies with origins sampled from January-May 2025, AGT obtains 0.7548 MAE versus 0.7694 for SOFTS. A single 5.3M-parameter model produces 156 aligned forecasts without company-specific fitting, providing one forecasting layer for integrated planning, liquidity, and working-capital analysis.
Shrutendra Harsola, Vignesh Subrahmaniam
Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

IMFACT: Counterfactual Explanations for Time Series via Intrinsic Mode Function Substitution

Oscillatory signals, such as vibration, carry class-discriminative information in specific frequency bands; perturbing them in raw feature space for counterfactual analysis easily destroys their temporal structure and produces physically implausible results. In this work, we introduce IMFACT (IMF-based counterfACTuals), a model-agnostic framework for generating plausible counterfactual explanations for time series classifiers that operates in the decomposition space of Empirical Mode Decomposition. An input signal is split into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs), and selected IMFs are progressively substituted with those of a Nearest Unlike Neighbour (NUN) until the classifier flips to the target class. We evaluate six IMF-selection strategies and a multi-NUN cycling extension on two UCR benchmarks (FaultDetectionA, FruitFlies). The variance-based strategy with three NUNs outperforms two prominent baseline techniques on reliability and plausibility metrics, while cycling across three NUNs yields the best proximity across both datasets.
Udo Schlegel, Julian Rakuschek, Thomas Seidl +3
Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

MINT: Tensor Decomposition on Stacked Recurrence Matrices for Time Series Data Mining

Recurrence plots are a time series data mining primitive applied to a variety of domains (e.g. star light curves, sound waveforms, CCT telemetry). This work proposes tensorized self-similarity matrices as a primitive for univariate time series datasets (N×nN\times n) of NN time series of length nn with a subsequence window of length mm, and whose tensor-based nature is naturally extensible to multivariate datasets. The proposed method to compute this primitive computes dot plots of size N×(n−m+1)×(n−m+1)N \times (n-m+1) \times (n-m+ 1) from these datasets, where the subsequent tensor is mined using tensor decomposition methods to mine for co-clustered patterns. We demonstrate our results in mass rapid transit, electricity demand, wind turbine, and car traffic data, finding the MINT pipeline effectively co-clusters cross-sensor patterns in highly regular datasets containing motifs at regular intervals.
Kaamil Kaka, Audrey Der, Evangelos E. Papalexakis +2
Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

PRISM: Powerful Time Series to Image (TS2I) Representations for Multivariate Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) underpins applications in predictive maintenance, finance, and cloud computing, however performance remains sensitive to representation choices, especially in multivariate settings. While transforming time series into images has shown success in forecasting and classification, it remains unclear how multivariate, high-dimensional series should be mapped to multi-channel images and whether vision backbones can match time-domain baselines in TSAD. We introduce PRISM, a plug-and-play meta-workflow enabling systematic construction and evaluation of image-based representations for multivariate TSAD. Our evaluation spanning over 7,000 experiments shows that well-designed PRISM configurations are competitive with 24 time-domain baselines, achieving the best VUS-PR on 10 of 14 datasets, with an average improvement of 41% over the best competing method on those datasets. Further, we identify channelization - how the channel dimension of multi-channel images is constructed - as a critical and previously understudied design dimension, and introduce MSM, a novel statistics-based scheme achieving 11-27% gains over PCA-based alternatives. Finally, ImageNet-pretrained encoders transfer effectively to TSAD, with frozen encoders retaining 92% of fine-tuned performance while training 1.8 times faster. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Smendowski/PRISM.
Mateusz Smendowski, Kamil Faber, Piotr Nawrocki +2
Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

TimeRLM: Recursive Language Models Enable Precise Anomaly Localization in Long-Context Time-Series

Precise anomaly localization over long-context time series is a crucial task in monitoring applications across clinical care, industrial operations, financial services, and logistics, where brief evidence may hide inside long spans of high-frequency data. Time-Series Language Models (TSLMs) are able to ingest time series data and verbalize findings on anomalies in natural language; however, recent benchmarks report a decrease in retrieval performance at long contexts, mirroring failure modes in text, vision, and audio. In the text domain, Recursive Language Models (RLMs) can recover much of this lost performance by keeping context external to the large language model (LLM), allowing the model to query it through code. We present TimeRLM, an RLM formulation for time-series that sequentially manipulates the signal using code and vision capabilities. We further introduce AnomalyXL, a synthetic long-context anomaly localization benchmark with programmatically injected anomalies that require precise retrieval. We implement five different task categories and two variants: AnomalyXL-MCQ and AnomalyXL-Localize. TimeRLM outperforms every evaluated TSLM and single-pass baseline on four of the five AnomalyXL-Localize tasks, reaching 0.682 IoU on localization and 0.745 on classify-with-evidence, versus at most 0.329 and 0.072 across all baselines. We post-train TimeRLM using reinforcement learning. The resulting model further improves performance and requires approximately one-third as many agent interaction turns as its untrained base model to produce a final answer. On unseen real-world ECG, sleep and software observability recordings, the post-trained TimeRLM retains or improves performance, surpassing TSLMs despite being trained exclusively on synthetic data. Our findings suggest recursive interaction with time-series is an effective approach for long-horizon retrieval.
Nicolas Zumarraga, Lorenzo Steno, Ning Wang +9
Aug 3, 2026stat.ME

Statistical comparisons of time-series feature sets on classification tasks

In recent years, numerous open-source software libraries have been developed for computing sets of features from univariate time series. The type and number of features vary across these feature sets, which have been constructed with varying disciplinary perspectives on quantifying structure in time-series data. To date, the relative strengths and weaknesses of these feature sets on time-series classification problems remains largely unexplored. Here we aimed to understand the relative performance of six open-source feature sets and three baseline feature sets (based on distributional and/or basic spectral structure) across 124 univariate time-series classification problems using a normalization-based approach to problem-level benchmarking that better indexes the relative strengths and weaknesses of different algorithms compared to prior rank-based approaches. Despite their dramatic differences in size, composition, and computation time, we found that feature sets performed relatively similarly overall (85.3% of pairwise comparisons resulted in ties), with the largest feature set, tsfresh, exhibiting the strongest overall performance (29.03% wins across all pairwise comparisons against other feature sets). We also highlighted specific problems on which the specific composition of a given feature set gave it a substantial performance advantage or disadvantage, and problems where simple baselines comprised of Fourier coefficients and quantiles were sufficient to achieve strong performance. Our results demonstrate the need to consider problem-level performance when benchmarking time-series feature sets, and highlight the importance of feature make-up in driving relative classification performance.
Trent Henderson, Ben D. Fulcher
Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

TFGformer: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Time-Frequency Graph Learning and Covariate Fusion

Large-scale multivariate time series from heterogeneous IoT sensors demand accurate long-term forecasting for resource scheduling and predictive maintenance. While recent time series foundation models exhibit strong generalization, they rely on static parametric knowledge and lack dynamic access to external historical patterns during inference. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a potential remedy, yet its application to time series forecasting is challenged by magnitude variations across heterogeneous sources and the mismatch between historical similarity and future consistency. We propose CrossRAG, a retrieval-augmented forecasting framework that integrates Shape-Aware Memory (SAM) with RevIN normalization for magnitude-robust shape-level retrieval, Future-Consistent Contrastive (FCC) learning to distinguish informative references from hard negatives with similar history but divergent futures, and Cross-Attention Temporal Fusion (CATF) to fuse retrieved historical--future reference pairs into the backbone's representations at the representation level. Experiments on seven public benchmarks show that CrossRAG consistently outperforms both parametric-only baselines and existing retrieval-augmented forecasting methods.
Yu Sun, Yuan Chang, Xiaohou Shi +1
Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

Causal Discovery with Inverted Self-attention for Multivariate Time Series

Causal discovery in multivariate time series data is challenging due to complex interactions, high dimensionality, and nonlinear dependencies among variables. Existing methods often struggle to capture these complexities, resulting in inaccurate causal structures. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that leverages self-attention mechanisms within the transformer architecture for causal discovery. Our approach introduces a novel inverted causal self-attention mechanism (CSAM) that emphasizes latent and indirect causal relationships by inverting tokens and inducing sparsity in attention scores, focusing on significant causal interactions and reducing spurious correlations. Additionally, we develop a global causal algorithm to identify global causal links, providing a holistic metric for causal influence, along with a causal verification module to ensure robustness in the identified causal relationships, enhancing the reliability of our framework. Experiments on both linear and nonlinear datasets, along with ablation studies and sensitivity analyses, show that our framework outperforms existing methods, demonstrating its potential for causal discovery in complex multivariate time series.
Yusen Liu, Yong Wang, Yifan Yin +3
Jul 30, 2026cs.LG

Enhancing Irregular Time Series Forecasting with Continuous-Time Modeling Framework

Irregular multivariate time series are widely encountered in applications such as healthcare monitoring, human activity recognition, and environmental sensing. Their core challenges stem from asynchronous observations, non-uniform sampling intervals, and the fact that temporal patterns themselves carry critical dynamic information. Existing approaches either rely on discretization-based preprocessing (e.g., interpolation, imputation, or aggregation), which disrupts the underlying continuous-time semantics, or adopt continuous-time modeling via ODE-based frameworks, which typically require specialized architectures and incur substantial computational overhead due to numerical solvers. To address these limitations, we propose WrapFlow, a continuous-time modeling framework for irregular time series forecasting. On the input side, WrapFlow introduces Continuous-Time Tokenization, which directly encodes raw observation events and explicitly models long unobserved intervals via gap-aware tokens. The resulting continuous-time tokens are then processed by a standard Transformer backbone to capture long-range temporal dependencies. On the output side, we develop a simulation-free training paradigm for Residual Flow Matching, which learns conditional residual vector fields around base predictions while avoiding numerical-solver simulation and backpropagation during training. This design enables high-quality continuous forecasting using only a small number of fixed rollout steps at inference. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that WrapFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Tianen Shen, Zhengyu Li, Yutong Li +4
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

DoTime: A Synthetic Benchmark Generator for Interventional and Counterfactual Time Series

Most benchmarks for causal inference over time series are observational, small, or domain-specific, leaving interventional and counterfactual estimation under-served exactly where it matters most, such as in healthcare, policy evaluation, and climate science. We introduce \textbf{DoTime}, an open, scalable, and theoretically grounded generator of multivariate temporal structural causal models (TSCMs) with interventions, released as the \code{dotime} PyPI package together with four frozen evaluation suites. Beyond existing work, it adds capabilities absent from prior generators: continuous-time intervention \emph{windows}, counterfactual sampling modes with a positivity guard, regime-switching SCMs as a strict generalization of interrupted time series, non-stationary dynamics by construction with switching SCM parameters, and deterministic ramp and sinusoidal intervention profiles that place trends and structural breaks \emph{inside} the evaluation window. Moreover, it demonstrates the suitability of the generator as a prior for a causal foundation model reference implementation. The released suites span a training-scale snapshot of 100,000100{,}000 trajectories and eight named identification structures, each with exact ground truth: paired interventional trajectories from the same SCM throughout, and shared-noise counterfactuals in the continuous-time suite. We ship reference baseline implementations with an evaluation harness, and pose a falsifiable claim: interventional training buys a measurable direction-accuracy advantage over an observational model of identical capacity. It is tested across three training seeds per arm. Under structure-matched evaluation on held-out episodes, the interventional prior-fitted network's (PFN) gap is positive in every structure, trajectory length, and seed tested.
Dennis Thumm, Billy Tim Anthony, Ying Chen
Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

Causal-TS: A Python Library for Causal Discovery in High-Dimensional and Nonstationary Time Series

We describe Causal-TS, an open-source Python library for causal discovery in high-dimensional and nonstationary multivariate time series. Causal-TS provides four specialized algorithms-CDNOTS, CDNOTS+, CEDAR, and GRACE-along with wrappers for GES, Granger, LASSO-VAR, and LGES, all sharing a unified conditional independence (CI) test layer with GPU acceleration via PyTorch. A regime discovery pipeline detects structural breaks via pluggable changepoint detectors and runs discovery per regime with regime-specific parameters. A command-line interface, synthetic data generators, and optional DoWhy integration provide an end-to-end pipeline from raw time series to causal effect estimates. The library is pip-installable, tested on Python 3.10--3.12, and available at https://github.com/bloomberg/causal-ts.
Mohammad Fesanghary
Jul 27, 2026quant-ph

Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Adaptive Non-Local Observables

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) predicts future values of multiple variables from historical data. While quantum neural networks have been increasingly applied to this task, they typically rely on fixed local measurements, which restrict their expressivity. We propose MTSF-ANO, a simple hybrid model for MTSF that integrates variational quantum circuits with adaptive non-local observables (ANO). On the four ETT datasets, MTSF-ANO ranks first or second in MSE in 17 of 20 settings, improving over the strongest baseline by up to 20% on ETTh1, and outperforms or matches its fixed local observable counterpart across all settings. Our ablations show how the quantum circuit design and ANO non-locality affect performance. These results suggest that ANO is a promising direction for quantum time series forecasting.
Yu-Ting Lee, Huan-Hsin Tseng, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen
Jul 25, 2026cs.LG

Domain-Prior-Regularized Graph Modeling for Anomaly Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems

Anomaly detection on multivariate sensor time series is critical for industrial monitoring of cyber-physical systems (CPS), where even subtle deviations from normal behavior can indicate process disruption. Recent graph-based approaches have made significant progress, but they often struggle in small-scale physical systems with scarce labeled anomalies and limited normal data. In such settings, graph-based models tend to capture spurious correlations and produce unstable sensor topologies. We propose DPR-GM (Domain-Prior-Regularized Graph Modeling), a forecasting-based framework that incorporates system design knowledge into graph construction. DPR-GM leverages a large language model (LLM) to extract directed physical couplings between sensor pairs from system documentation, which are encoded as a binary domain adjacency matrix serving as a structural gate over sensor relations. This gate is then modulated by Pearson correlations estimated from normal training data. The anomaly score is further weighted by sensor-level reliability derived from the coefficient of variation. All graph and weighting components are fixed prior to training and add no learnable parameters. On the SKAB benchmark, DPR-GM outperforms graph-based, statistical, and deep learning baselines across F1, AUROC, and AUPRC, showing that domain-structured graph priors are a practical alternative to fully learned topologies in data-scarce CPS.
Youngseok Hwang, Joonsung Kwon, Geonwoo Lee +1
Jul 25, 2026cs.LG

Foundation Models and Fine-Tuning: Toward a New Generation of Models for Time Series Forecasting

Inspired by recent breakthroughs in large language models for natural language processing, foundation models have emerged as a promising paradigm for zero-shot time series forecasting, enabling accurate predictions on datasets never seen during pre-training. Ranging from tens to hundreds of millions of parameters, these models are pre-trained on vast and diverse collections of time series, learning generalizable representations that support both point and probabilistic forecasting. This approach alleviates the need for dataset-specific model design and manual tuning, offering a unified solution across forecasting problems. In this work, we review the main architectures, pre-training strategies, and optimization methods underpinning these models. We further investigate post-pre-training fine-tuning of selected foundation models to enhance their performance on specific datasets. Our empirical results demonstrate that this step consistently improves forecasting accuracy over the zero-shot baseline.
Morad Laglil, Bertrand Pracca, Emilie Devijver +1
Jul 24, 2026stat.ML

Hopformer: Homogeneity-Pursuit Transformer for Time Series Forecasting

Forecasting multiple time-series with high-dimensional covariates presents a core challenge: unifying common temporal patterns while retaining meaningful series-specific information. We introduce Hopformer (Homogeneity-Pursuit Transformer), a two-stage framework that addresses this challenge. In the first stage, we perform a Sparsity Pattern Aggregation (SPA) scheme extracting a common low-variance trend that incorporates the covariates. This acts as a homogenization layer. In the second stage, a LoRA-fine-tuned Transformer models the remaining complex dependencies in the residual. Our method is theoretically grounded. We prove that SPA achieves a near-optimal bias-variance trade-off via an oracle inequality. We also provide generalization bounds for the second stage under dependent time series data. Hopformer sets a new state of the art, improving MASE by an average of 6.56% across synthetic and real-world forecasting benchmarks.
Wan Zhang, Qinjie Lin, Chan Lee +3
Jul 23, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Sufficiency: Time Series Explanation with Counterfactual Necessity

Faithful explanations of time-series classifiers should identify subsequences that are not only sufficient to preserve a black-box model's prediction, but also necessary for maintaining it. However, existing sufficiency-oriented methods can assign high importance to spurious subsequences that support the prediction without being essential to the model's decision. We introduce \textbf{TimePNS}, a necessity-aware framework for time-series explanation. Inspired by Pearl's counterfactual notion of necessity, TimePNS assesses whether a temporal factor is necessary by intervening on it and measuring whether the original prediction is disrupted. The framework adopts a two-stage design. Stage I learns an identifiable causal generative process together with a sufficiency-oriented explanation mask. Stage II performs counterfactual interventions on temporal factors to derive necessity signals, which supervise a temporal gate that refines the initial explanation by suppressing non-essential components and emphasizing counterfactually necessary ones. Experiments on synthetic and real-world time-series benchmarks show that TimePNS more accurately identifies decision-critical subsequences and consistently improves sufficiency-necessity trade-offs over strong baselines.
Hongnan Ma, Yiwei Shi, Mengyue Yang +1
Jul 23, 2026stat.ML

Transformer-based Diffusion models for Hydrological Time Series Probabilistic Imputation and Forecasting

The modeling of hydrometeorological time series with limited observations is a key challenge in the monitoring of hydro-systems and water resources, as well as for flood or drought risk assessment. Due to the high variability of the underlying processes and the sparsity of available measurements, traditional statistical approaches often struggle to accurately represent their dynamics. In this context, recent advances in deep learning offer a promising direction for improving the representation and generation of complex temporal processes sampled at several observation sites. This study investigates the application of transformer-based diffusion models to the simulation and reconstruction of hydrological time series. The proposed framework is applied to the joint modeling of water quantity and quality at six sites spread across three adjacent headwater catchments located in North-East France on a limestone plateau covered by forests and field crops. The model is calibrated and validated using available observational data, which has been quality controlled and corrected for sensor drift and malfunction through collaborative efforts by LNE metrology expertise and Andra monthly quality control over more than 15 years. Its performance is compared with several established baseline approaches commonly used for time series modeling. Quantitative evaluation metrics are employed to assess the ability of the proposed method to reproduce key temporal characteristics of the observed signals in two settings: the imputation of incomplete time series and the forecasting of upcoming hydrological conditions. Results support the effectiveness of the transformer-based approach and highlight its capacity to capture and simulate the complex patterns present in hydrological data. In particular, the results indicate that diffusion models can efficiently sample realistic time series distributions under observation settings with variable missing data for both forecasting and imputation.
Ferdinand Bhavsar, Lionel Benoit, Maxime Savatier +1
Jul 23, 2026cs.AI

From Scalars to Time Series: Rethinking Implicit Neural Representations for Time-Varying Volumetric Data

Implicit neural representations (INRs) for time-varying volumetric data are typically trained using dense sampling over spatiotemporal coordinates, where each observation corresponds to a single point in space and time. This coordinate-wise formulation requires extensive sampling during optimization, leading to high computational cost and inefficient use of temporal structure. In this work, we revisit this design choice and show that dense spatiotemporal sampling is not necessary for learning time-varying fields. Instead, we represent the data as a collection of spatially indexed time series and train INRs using sequence-level supervision over each spatial location, rather than coordinate-wise scalar samples. This reformulation eliminates the need for dense spatiotemporal sampling and instead learns each spatial location from its full temporal evolution in a structured manner. We demonstrate that this representation is compatible with a range of existing INR architectures and consistently improves reconstruction quality, while significantly reducing training cost. Furthermore, we show that this formulation can be combined with mixture-of-experts architectures, and that our MoE instantiation further improves reconstruction quality compared to both the base reformulation and existing MoE-based INR methods, providing a stronger capacity allocation under heterogeneous temporal dynamics.
Weihan Zhang, Xuan Zhao, Yenwen Peng +2
Jul 23, 2026cs.SD

Spectrogram-Based Joint Detection, Localization, and Classification of Events in Continuously Recorded IBR Waveforms

Continuously recorded high-resolution waveform measurements provide rich information about fast power system dynamics. However, they require automated methods to identify events. This problem is addressed by developing a spectrogram-based framework to jointly detect, localize, and classify events in real-world continuously recorded waveforms at the terminal of an Inverter-Based Resource. We recast this problem as a temporal object detection problem on spectrogram images, as they capture the transient and harmonic signatures more explicitly than in raw waveform data. Each time-series waveform is transformed using the short-time Fourier transform, and the resulting per-channel spectrograms are stacked as a tensor for event detection. We benchmark this method against a detector operating directly on raw time-series measurements. Experiments on single-phase disturbances and three-phase faults demonstrate that the proposed spectrogram method consistently improves event detection, localization, and classification over the raw waveform baseline.
Shivanshu Tripathi, Maziar Raissi, Hamed Mohsenian-Rad
Jul 22, 2026cs.LG

PIER: Physics-Informed Environmental Retrieval for Time-Series Modeling

Accurate modeling of environmental systems is fundamental to scientific understanding and decision-making, yet remains challenging because observations are limited and physical dynamics vary across systems. Retrieval-augmented approaches offer a natural path to transfer knowledge across systems, but standard embedding-based retrieval does not guarantee consistency of underlying physical processes, since scenarios with similar embeddings may arise from different underlying mechanisms. We propose Physics-Informed Environmental Retrieval (PIER), a model-agnostic framework that augments embedding-based retrieval with a physics-aware stream that scores candidates by flux-response consistency with the target, using local verifiers trained on physics-derived flux features. A weight adjustment mechanism then learns per-scenario weights that adaptively balance the two retrieval streams based on diagnostic features summarizing physics-stream reliability. Experiments on 356 lakes across the Midwestern United States spanning 41 years show that PIER consistently outperforms baselines for water temperature and dissolved oxygen prediction, and serves as a general augmentation strategy across diverse backbones.
Shiyuan Luo, Runlong Yu, Chonghao Qiu +6
Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

D3VL: Understanding Driving Scenes from 3D Time Series Data and Video with Language Models

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have triggered the development of end-to-end MLLMs for autonomous driving. However, the main emphasis to date has been for MLLMs using 2D images and videos. In contrast, this paper considers MLLM effectiveness using 3D sensors, particularly LiDAR and stereo cameras. LiDAR presents unique challenges to integration within an MLLM, largely because of data sparsity and lack of a grid structure for the data. For similar reasons, fusion of camera and LiDAR data within an MLLM pipeline is also uncommon. However, most autonomous systems rely on LiDAR-based sensing, and incorporating 3D data has been proven to improve performance in traditional 3D scene perception tasks. This paper presents D3VL, a novel MLLM framework that integrates 2D and 3D time-series data in a single but simple architecture. The model aims to answer questions involving traffic scene understanding and safety. D3VL shows an 11% improvement in the KITTI Question-Answering (QA) dataset compared to baseline methods in processing 2D and 3D time-series data. This paper further introduces the Waymo QA dataset extension, which assesses models' capabilities in processing 3D and time-series data under diverse driving conditions. D3VL implementation code and WaymoQA extension can be found on our supplemental website: https://automotivesafety-lvlm.github.io
Heesang Han, A. Lynn Abbott, Abhijit Sarkar
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Biological Amnesia in ICU Time-Series Prediction: A Drift-Adaptive Two-Stream Architecture with Temporal Retrieval

Background: Clinical decision support systems degrade silently as treatment protocols evolve, yet standard adaptation methods treat models as monolithic blocks, unable to distinguish stable patient physiology from shifting institutional practice. Methods: We propose an adaptive clinical intelligence architecture for ICU intervention prediction that structurally decouples physiological from treatment representations, confining parameter updates to the treatment stream upon a dual distributional and accuracy trigger. Automated audit logs record which treatment features drove each adaptation event and how their importance shifted. At inference, an attribution-driven Temporal RAG module grounds each prediction in patient-specific, era-matched PubMed evidence anchored to the patient's dominant physiological features. Experiments used 84,792 MIMIC-IV stays (2008-2022) under strict chronological split. Results: Drift localised entirely to the treatment stream, validating the structural prior. Selective adaptation improved vasopressor and septic shock discrimination and calibration over the static source model. A fully retrained baseline yielded marginally higher aggregate discrimination but missed 26 septic shock cases the framework correctly identified, with none in the reverse direction; retrieval consistency with the pre-adaptation source model was preserved by the framework but degraded substantially in the retrained baseline. Conclusions: Structurally constraining adaptation to drifting components while preserving stable physiological representations enables clinical AI to evolve with practice without distorting learned patient biology. This architecture offers a template for governable, interpretable deployment of adaptive models in high-stakes clinical environments.
Fatema Ferdous Tamanna, K. M. Merajul Arefin, Md. Abdul Masud
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

ConceptCF: Concept-based Counterfactuals for the Explainability of Time Series

This paper proposes ConceptCF, a method for counterfactual generation that operates on human-interpretable concepts. In high-stakes domains such as healthcare and predictive maintenance, artificial intelligence models can increase efficiency and safety. Explainability is key to ensure these models rely on causal relationships rather than spurious correlations. Counterfactual explanations identify minimal modifications that would change a model's predictions. Existing methods for time series operate on individual points or subsequences without ensuring interpretability of the mutations. ConceptCF instead modifies meaningful concepts. As a result we can provide explanations in terms of these concepts, for example ``the model's prediction would be Sit' instead of Walk' if you increase the scale of the movement''. In this paper, the concepts are constructed through time series decomposition, resulting in concepts such as scale, and frequency bands. Counterfactuals are generated using a genetic algorithm that optimizes the concept mutations. Evaluation against five state-of-the-art approaches demonstrates that ConceptCF consistently achieves top-tier performance across validity, confidence, proximity, sparsity and plausibility metrics.
Annemarie Jutte, Faizan Ahmed, Jeroen Linssen +1
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Causal Discovery on Irregular Time Series

Causal discovery methods have shown strong performance in temporal systems, but they typically rely on regular and discrete lag structures, limiting their applicability to regularly sampled data. However, many real-world tasks require dealing with irregularly sampled streams of events, such as sensor streams, healthcare data, and financial transactions. In this work, we propose an extension of PCMCI+, a state-of-the-art method for causal discovery on regular multivariate time series, to allow for handling irregular time series. Instead of modelling causal relations through fixed-lag dependencies, our method aggregates causal influence over predefined temporal windows. We evaluate our method on synthetic irregular event streams with known causal structures under different signal-to-noise ratios, showing that it consistently recovers the underlying causal graph and substantially outperforms the standard PCMCI+ on irregularly sampled data.
Martim Penim, Ricardo Ribeiro Pereira, Jacopo Bono +3
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

Knowledge-Assisted Multi-Graph Dependency Learning for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection in Multi-Stage Industrial Processes

Industrial processes often generate complex, interdependent time-series data from multiple sensors across multiple stages, forming complex dependencies among variables and process stages. Effective monitoring and timely anomaly detection of these time series through multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTAD) is crucial for preventing failures and ensuring the reliability of automated systems. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have advanced MTAD by leveraging data-driven graphs to model complex dependencies among variables, effectively capturing relational structures within multivariate time series to enhance anomaly detection performance. However, existing GNN-based approaches often overlook critical process knowledge, and even when this knowledge is considered, seamlessly incorporating it into existing models remains inherently challenging, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this limitation, we propose a knowledge-assisted multi-graph framework for modeling sensor dependencies in multi-stage industrial processes for MTAD, which explicitly incorporates process knowledge into graph learning to enhance dependency modeling and improve anomaly detection performance. Our method constructs three complementary graphs: one purely data-driven and two refined by integrating structural constraints derived from process knowledge. To effectively leverage these graphs for anomaly detection, we employ a multi-graph attention network, enabling a more accurate and robust representation of complex dependencies. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world, multi-stage industrial datasets demonstrate that incorporating process knowledge substantially enhances anomaly detection performance.
Jaeyeong Lee, Taeseong Yoon, Wonmo Koo +1
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

Scaling Time Series Classification via XAI-Driven Data Reduction

Explainable AI (XAI) for time series has seen significant algorithmic growth, but its utility in providing measurable performance gains for downstream tasks remains under-explored. This paper bridges this gap by introducing drXAI, a novel methodology that repurposes XAI attribution methods for effective data reduction in Time Series Classification (TSC). The core challenge in modern TSC is scalability; state-of-the-art models, such as Transformers, exhibit quadratic complexity relative to sequence length and linear complexity relative to the number of channels. This renders them computationally prohibitive for massive datasets. drXAI addresses this by using a fast, GPU-accelerated classifier (Hydra) to generate local attributions. We aggregate these into global feature importance scores and employ an automated elbow-cut heuristic to select the most salient features without requiring manual thresholds. We evaluate our approach on both synthetic and real-world univariate and multivariate datasets. On synthetic benchmarks, drXAI successfully recovers ground-truth features where traditional baselines fail. On real-world data, drXAI achieves between 80% and 90% data reduction while maintaining classification accuracy comparable to models trained on the full dataset. Most importantly, we show that drXAI allows resource-intensive models like ConvTran to scale to datasets that were previously inaccessible due to memory constraints. Our results show the benefits of using XAI not just for interpretability, but as a robust tool for feature selection and scalability in time series analysis. All our code and data are openly available.
Davide Italo Serramazza, Thach Le Nguyen, Georgiana Ifrim
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

MIDiff: Tackling Sparsity and Imbalance in Mobile Usage Generation via Multivariate-Imaging Diffusion

Mobile usage traces are critical for tasks such as user behavior prediction and app recommendation, yet their use is constrained by privacy restrictions and costly large-scale data collection. Although generative models perform well on general time series, their application to mobile usage data remains challenging because (i) limited user activity causes severe sparsity, (ii) heterogeneous variable types complicate joint modeling, and (iii) functional differences across apps create pronounced usage imbalance. To address these challenges, we propose Multivariate-Imaging Diffusion (MIDiff), a diffusion-based framework operating in an imaging space defined by Cross-Gramian Angular Sum Field (C-GASF). C-GASF transforms sparse multivariate sequences into correlation images, while MIDiff employs Triple Attention in a U-Net to preserve temporal consistency and variable dependencies. Experiments show that MIDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance across fidelity metrics. In particular, it obtains a Discriminative Accuracy (DA) of 0.1526, compared with 0.3476 for the strongest baseline, ZITS-VAE, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating realistic and diverse mobile usage traces. Our code is available at https://github.com/YilaiLiu-HKU/MIDiff.
Yilai Liu, Shiyuan Zhang, Hongyang Du
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

VAIOM: Continuous-Input, Discrete-Output Decoder-Only Financial Sequence Modeling

Financial observations are continuous, heterogeneous, and noisy, whereas decoder-only next-token models are usually built around discrete symbolic inputs. We introduce Vector-Input Autoregressive Inference for Ordinal-Return Modeling (VAIOM), a decoder-only Transformer for probabilistic next-return modeling on one-hour foreign-exchange bars. VAIOM separates input representation from output likelihood: continuous multivariate financial-event vectors preserve numerical structure at the input, while a categorical distribution over the next volatility-normalized return bucket supports cross-entropy training and likelihood evaluation. The selected 0.9M Hybrid Continuous Input model combines continuous event features with categorical asset metadata, a Mixture-of-Market-States return head, Gap, volatility-regime, and Ordinal auxiliary objectives, and full-sequence supervision. Models and preprocessing are fit using pre-2024 Train data; models are selected on 2024H2 Validation and evaluated without refitting on two 2025 Test periods. Across three independent training seeds, every model outperforms fixed single-bar LightGBM baseline in both Test halves. For the canonical checkpoint, paired gains over LightGBM are 0.029 and 0.043 bits per event. Validation experiments show that continuous input improves over discrete-token input under the same categorical return objective, full-sequence supervision improves over last-position training, and auxiliary representation shaping together with a mixture-structured return head improves return likelihood in controlled comparisons. A supporting capacity study finds that the smallest evaluated complete architecture rung achieves the strongest Validation likelihood on the present corpus.
Yiming Ma, Xinyu Chen
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

ReDiTT: Retrieval Augmented Conditional Diffusion Transformers for Asynchronous Time Series

We present a diffusion based model for asynchronous time series prediction, where the goal is to predict the next inter event time and event type. To address the inherent uncertainty of future events, we introduce ReDiTT, a retrieval augmented conditional diffusion transformer that operates in latent space. ReDiTT retrieves structurally similar latent sequences from a memory bank during both training and inference and incorporates them as reference conditions through cross attention. This retrieval based conditioning allows the model to attend to relevant temporal dynamics and provides global structural guidance for generation. As a result, ReDiTT stabilizes long horizon forecasting and improves sample diversity. Experiments on seven real world datasets demonstrate state of the art performance on next event prediction and long horizon forecasting. Our code is available at https://github.com/BorealisAI/ReDiTT.
Saiyue Lyu, Zhitian Zhang, Ruizhi Deng +1
Jul 10, 2026cs.LG

GatedLinear: Adaptive Routing of Complementary Linear Bases for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting requires models to capture diverse, often mutually exclusive, temporal dynamics, from smooth trend continuation to nonstationary drift and strict phase-aligned recurrence. While recent deep learning models have improved accuracy, they typically force these diverse patterns through a single computational backbone governed by fixed algorithmic inductive biases (e.g., self-attention or spectral filtering). This single-mechanism approach often struggles with the profound heterogeneity of real-world series, where different variables and forecast horizons necessitate fundamentally different predictive treatments. To address this, we propose GatedLinear: a lightweight framework that frames forecasting as the adaptive routing of complementary linear bases. GatedLinear leverages a pool of three specialized mechanisms: a global trend-seasonal basis for smooth projection, a difference-based incremental basis for nonstationary drift, and a phase-aligned recurrence basis for explicit cyclic reuse. To dynamically orchestrate these distinct behaviors, we introduce a Tri-Factorized Fusion Gate that disentangles routing decisions into channel-specific preferences, horizon-aware offsets, and phase-indexed biases derived from known future time marks. This design allows the model to perform highly granular, point-wise soft routing across different predictive regimes without stacking computationally heavy neural modules. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive accuracy against recent complex foundational models, while offering explicitly interpretable routing patterns and operating with a substantially smaller parameter footprint.
Qitai Tan, Ruiwen Gu, Yilin Su +3
Jul 10, 2026cs.DS

Terminal Dimension Reduction for Time Series with Applications

Terminal embeddings have emerged as a powerful tool for dimension reduction. Given a set of points P⊂RdP\subset \mathbb{R}^d, a terminal embedding is a mapping f:Rd→Rtf:\mathbb{R}^d\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^t that preserves the pairwise distance between any pair of points p∈Pp\in P and q∈Rdq\in \mathbb{R}^d up to small distortion under this mapping. Terminal embeddings have been particularly fruitful for constructing kk-means and kk-median coresets, where the objective is to find a typically weighted subset ΩΩ of PP such that for any candidate solution, the cost of the clustering objective on ΩΩ approximates the cost of the clustering objective on PP up to small distortion. Unfortunately, these techniques have not been extended to more complicated structures such as clustering time-series data under common straight-line interpolation between measurements. The main issue is that terminal embeddings, arguably the central technique in this line of research, cannot be linear and are thus not immediately suitable to preserve linear structures. In this work, we develop a generalization of terminal embeddings to affine line-segments that overcomes this issue. We showcase their applicability by using our lines-preserving terminal embeddings to obtain the first dimension-free coresets for clustering time-series under the Fréchet distance. The underlying dimension reduction uses Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) embeddings, and our experiments indicate that terminal embeddings perform similarly to JL and favorably against PCA for synthetic and real-world time-series, while only terminal embeddings extend pairwise distance preservation to the full ambient space.
Alexander Munteanu, Matteo Russo, David Saulpic +1
Jul 9, 2026cs.LG

TSRouter: Dynamic Modality-Model Selection for Time Series Reasoning

Time series reasoning is essential for real-world problem-solving. While both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can reason about time-series data, their capabilities are complementary: LLMs process time series as text sequences and thus preserve exact numerical understanding, but struggle with global patterns, whereas VLMs efficiently capture these patterns by visualizing time series but may lose fine-grained details. Moreover, models vary significantly in task-specific expertise and inference costs. Dynamically selecting the most suitable modality and model for each query is therefore crucial, yet challenging because it requires modeling the complex interactions among tasks, queries, modalities, and models, which carry rich contextual signals. To this end, we introduce TSRouter, a graph-based dynamic routing framework. TSRouter constructs a heterogeneous graph of task, query, modality, and model nodes to contextualize the interactions among query characteristics, modality attributes, and model capabilities. TSRouter formulates routing as a candidate scoring problem, where each modality-model pair is evaluated based on user-defined performance-cost preferences to select the optimal candidate. Comprehensive evaluations on 4 distinct time series reasoning tasks reveal that TSRouter substantially outperforms diverse baselines with 16% to 46% relative improvements. Furthermore, TSRouter demonstrates robust zero-shot plug-and-play generalization to unseen models and novel tasks and preserves high performance while reducing computational overhead through cost-aware optimization. Our code is available at https://github.com/tianyi-lab/TSRouter.
Fangxu Yu, Tao Feng, Dehai Min +3
Jul 9, 2026cs.LG

RhyMix: A Lightweight Adaptive Multi-Rhythm Network for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

Real-world time series exhibit complex dynamics characterized by multiple simultaneous temporal patterns: short-term fluctuations, periodic seasonal cycles, long-term trends, and irregular abrupt changes. However, many existing forecasting architectures rely on single-path temporal modeling--transformers capture long-range dependencies but smooth local variations, convolutions capture local patterns but have limited receptive fields, and linear models are efficient but cannot capture nonlinear dynamics. To address this, we introduce RhyMix (RHYthm MIXture), a hybrid neural architecture designed around a parallel dual-path modeling paradigm with adaptive gating mechanisms. RhyMix integrates two complementary encoding branches: (i) a Cyclic Path that incorporates explicit seasonal inductive bias through learnable cyclic embeddings, capturing predictable rhythmic patterns; and (ii) a lightweight Multi-Scale Temporal Convolutional Network with Channel Attention Path that employs multi-scale depthwise dilated convolutions to capture temporal dependencies across different receptive fields. A key innovation is the use of adaptive gating at multiple levels: a path gate dynamically combines four specialized forecasting heads (Direct, Trend-Seasonal Decomposition, Local Convolution, and Periodic Fusion) per sample and channel, while a hybrid gate adaptively balances the Cyclic and MSTCN-CA Paths based on input characteristics. This design ensures the model adapts to specific temporal patterns while maintaining linear complexity in sequence length, channels, and prediction horizon. Across extensive benchmarks on 12 real-world datasets for long-term forecasting, RhyMix achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 of 12 datasets. The model remains lightweight (~40K params) with linear complexity and low-latency inference (<5ms),suitable for resource-constrained edge devices and real-time deployment.
Sumit Satishrao Shevtekar, Chandresh Kumar Maurya
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

FMMVCC: Fuzzy Mamba-based Multi-View Contrastive Clustering for Univariate Time Series

In many realistic scenarios, large volumes of time series data are generated with limited or expensive annotations. This limitation makes supervised learning methods difficult to apply and leads to the use of unsupervised approaches capable of discovering meaningful structures directly from raw data. Clustering therefore plays a crucial role in organizing time series into groups that share similar temporal patterns, enabling exploratory analysis and downstream tasks without requiring manual labeling. However, existing deep clustering methods often struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies or rely on architectures with high computational cost. This paper introduces FMMVCC, a Mamba-based deep clustering framework for time series that leverages state space sequence modeling to efficiently learn temporal representations with linear complexity. Additionally, it utilizes multi-view self-supervised learning with temporal masking and augmentations. Experimental evaluation in 15 benchmark datasets proves that FMMVCC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving the best overall performance in 29 of 60 total metric evaluations and the highest average rank in all tested scenarios.
Donato Cerciello, Leonardo Schiavo, Angel Panizo-LLedot +2
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

Rethinking Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting Evaluation

We introduce a new context-enriched, multimodal time series forecasting benchmark, TimesX. TimesX contains a wide selection of high-quality real-world time series with diverse domains and textual contexts obtained from an automated data generation pipeline, which helps address three main issues of existing multimodal forecasting benchmarks: (1) poor generalization due to the small scale and synthetic nature of benchmark data, (2) very limited types of textual contexts in the benchmarks, and (3) an inability to mitigate data leakage in evaluation. We conduct a thorough empirical study of zero-shot multimodal forecasting approaches on TimesX. Our results suggest that many approaches that perform well on existing benchmarks may fail on TimesX. In contrast, simple ensemble methods that leverage rich textual context accompanying time-series can outperform strong baselines on TimesX.
Haoxin Liu, Yichen Zhou, Rajat Sen +2
Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

Enhancing deep learning models for time series classification via knowledge distillation

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in various domains including time series analysis, computer vision and natural language processing. However, high computational and memory demands of state-of-the-art architectures pose challenges for deployment in resource-limited environments. Knowledge Distillation (KD) addresses this by transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller, more efficient student model while maintaining competitive performance. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of KD for Time Series Classification (TSC) across three architectures: the classical Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), the convolutional Inception model and the transformer-based ConvTran model. We evaluate our approach on UCR Archive, the largest benchmark repository of time series datasets, by modifying architectural components such as convolutional filters, Inception modules and attention heads across the three architectures. Our results consistently show that KD most effectively benefits student models of intermediate complexity across all three architectures, with the distilled FCN student reducing parameters by a factor of 38, the distilled Inception student achieving nearly the same performance as the teacher with 42% fewer parameters and the distilled ConvTran student with 2 attention heads showing the most significant improvement through distillation. To encourage further research and reproducibility, we provide our implementation at https://github.com/MSD-IRIMAS/KD-4-TSC.
Javidan Abdullayev, Maxime Devanne, Jonathan Weber +1
Jul 7, 2026stat.ME

tsbootstrap: Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification and Conformal Prediction for Time Series

Finance, sensing, and demand streams violate the exchangeability that IID conformal prediction and the IID bootstrap assume, and existing libraries implement either a general resampling engine or conformal calibration without the other. tsbootstrap provides block, residual, sieve, and wild resampling, classical bootstrap confidence intervals, and adaptive conformal calibrators (EnbPI, ACI, NexCP, AgACI) through a single typed API in which a specification object selects each method. In a controlled coverage study the IID bootstrap undercovers sharply under dependence; dependence-aware methods reduce the coverage deficit, the sieve nearest to nominal under short-memory linear dependence. On the shared fixed-statistic path a compiled backend runs several times faster than arch, and a streaming reduce avoids materializing the O(Bn)O(Bn) replicate tensor, limiting peak extra memory to O(B)O(B) for the statistic array. The software is MIT licensed (v0.6.1).
Sankalp Gilda
Jul 6, 2026cs.LG

Advances in Neural Controlled Differential Equations

Many real-world systems evolve continuously, yet most machine learning models interpret time series as discrete sequences. Continuous-time approaches instead treat time series as samples from an underlying input path, a formulation that naturally accommodates irregularly sampled or oversampled data. Among these, Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDEs) are a maximally expressive class of models that parametrise a vector field using a neural network and evolve their hidden state by solving a dynamical system driven by the input path. NCDEs typically use a non-linear vector field, so their expressive power and continuous-time flexibility come at the cost of a forward pass that is both computationally expensive and inherently sequential, limiting their scalability and practical applicability. This thesis advances the training and scalability of NCDEs through three complementary contributions. First, building on neural rough differential equations, Log-NCDEs apply the Log-ODE method to efficiently approximate an NCDE's solution during training, improving both computational speed and empirical performance. Second, Linear NCDEs replace the non-linear vector field with a linear one, enabling closed-form solutions and parallel-in-time computation without sacrificing theoretical expressivity. Third, Structured Linear NCDEs use structured linear vector fields to further enhance efficiency while maintaining theoretical expressiveness and empirical performance. Collectively, these methods reduce the time per training step for an NCDE by up to three orders of magnitude while achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse time series benchmarks.
Benjamin Walker
Jul 5, 2026cs.LG

Exogenous Dropout: A Simple, Strong Baseline for Corruption-Robust Time Series Forecasting with Covariates

Time series forecasters that use exogenous covariates are fragile in deployment: when those covariates are noised, temporally misaligned, or missing, strong exogenous-fusion and exogenous-adapted models can degrade far above the endogenous-only floor. We study whether such robustness requires specialized architectures, or whether it can be obtained through a simple training intervention. We propose exogenous dropout, a model-agnostic method that randomly zeros whole exogenous channels during training. Across electricity-price forecasting, reservoir hydrology, and meteorology, exogenous dropout substantially improves robustness under Gaussian noise, temporal misalignment, and fully missing channels, while preserving clean accuracy. Applied to a dual-correlation network, it yields the most robust model in our experiments, outperforming a deliberately strong bounded architectural foil, BoundEx, which combines a learnable gate, a fallback residual to the endogenous backbone, and per-channel exogenous FiLM modulation. Architecture-by-dropout ablations, gate-behavior diagnostics, and a representation-level bound show that explicit architectural boundedness is not necessary for this robustness: an unbounded model trained with exogenous dropout is more robust than the bounded model in every domain. We release a corruption-robustness benchmark and recommend exogenous dropout as a simple, strong baseline for future work on time series forecasting with covariates.
Hao Hu, Xue-shan Ai