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

Jun 6, 2026cs.LG

Mix, Don't Pick: Why Synthetic Corpus Composition Matters for Time Series Foundation Model Pretraining

Choosing the wrong synthetic generator for time-series foundation model pretraining is costly: under identical training budgets, the best and worst generators produce up to a 2×2\times gap in forecasting error, yet the field has no principled way to make this choice. The problem is compounded by the fact that generator rankings are not stable across architectures: across 11 generator families evaluated on Chronos-T5-Mini and Moirai-Small trained from scratch, we find that which generators are useful depends on the model architecture. Rather than solving the generator selection problem, we sidestep it: a simple equal-weight mixture of all generators matches or beats the best individual generator for both architectures, and composing this mixture with real data yields the strongest pretraining corpora overall. Synthetic pretraining is therefore a corpus composition problem, not a generator selection problem, and composition choices should be validated per model family rather than assumed to transfer.
Aaryan Nagpal, Debdeep Sanyal, Murari Mandal +2
Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

Trio: Learning Time-Series Forecasting with Temporal-Spatial-Sample Attention and Structural Causal Priors

Multivariate time-series forecasting requires models to reason over temporal dynamics, cross-variable dependencies, and historical input-output correspondences. Recent Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) suggest that synthetic tasks can be useful for learning transferable inference behavior. However, directly transferring this paradigm to time-series forecasting remains difficult, since temporal order, dynamic lags, and recurring historical patterns are not naturally captured by ordinary tabular priors. Motivated by this observation, we propose Trio, a sample-aware time-series forecasting architecture based on Temporal-Spatial-Sample attention. Temporal attention captures within-window dynamics, spatial attention models inter-variable dependencies, and sample attention retrieves relevant historical lookback-future pairs to guide the current prediction. Rather than claiming a fully general PFN-style forecaster, our goal is to study how historical input-output examples can be explicitly organized and reused within a forecasting model. We further introduce a Time-Series Structural Causal Model (TS-SCM) generator to create structured synthetic forecasting tasks with dynamic lags, cross-variable interactions, noise, feedback, and distributional drift. Experiments on synthetic, industrial, and public benchmarks show that the proposed architecture improves forecasting performance. Exploratory zero-shot experiments further suggest that TS-SCM-generated tasks may provide useful structural priors, while fully general PFN-style time-series forecasting remains an open problem.
Tao Chen, Yexu Zhou, Zhi Gong +9
Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

CF-JEPA: Mask-free forward prediction with asymmetric encoder utilization for time-series representation learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for time-series representation learning is dominated by two paradigms: contrastive methods, which face challenges in constructing positive or negative pairs, and masking-based methods, which disrupt the temporal continuity of time-series signals. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) offers a promising alternative by predicting in representation space rather than reconstructing raw inputs. However, existing time-series JEPA variants still rely on masking and therefore inherit its continuity problem. Crop-based Forward JEPA (CF-JEPA) is proposed as an innovative mask-free framework that replaces masking with multi-horizon forward prediction: random crops serve as context views, and short-, mid-, and long-horizon future representations are predicted in the forward temporal direction, directly leveraging the inherent temporal ordering of time-series data as a learning signal. A strong asymmetry is also identified between the online encoder and the exponential moving average (EMA) target encoder, both produced from a single training run: the online encoder develops higher-rank discriminative features, while the EMA target encoder develops smoother, lower-rank temporal features. Exploiting this asymmetry, classification is routed to the online encoder and forecasting or anomaly detection to the EMA target encoder, achieving a 27% reduction in multivariate forecasting mean squared error (MSE) at no additional training cost. Across 126 University of California, Riverside (UCR) and 26 University of East Anglia (UEA) classification datasets, eight electricity transformer temperature forecasting benchmarks, and Key Performance Indicator /Yahoo anomaly detection, CF-JEPA achieves the highest average accuracy and rank on UCR and UEA among self-supervised baselines and ranks second on univariate forecasting and k-nearest neighbors-scored anomaly detection.
Jaehoon Lee, Sunghyun Sim
Jun 4, 2026cs.AI

TRACE: A Temporal Conditional Estimation for Multimodal Time Series Foundation Models

Time series foundation models (TS-FMs) aim to learn generalizable temporal representations that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. In real-world multimodal settings, time series are frequently affected by temporal misalignment and partial modality missingness, where different modalities are observed at heterogeneous time scales or are partially absent. Existing approaches typically rely on naive imputation or masking strategies, which fail to account for cross-modal dependencies and often lead to misaligned or degraded representations. We propose TRACE, a conditional estimation paradigm for multimodal time series foundation model pipelines under missingness and irregular sampling, allowing incomplete target modalities to be systematically inferred from available auxiliary modalities. We evaluate TRACE on diverse multimodal benchmarks spanning healthcare and affective computing, including the MIMIC-IV clinical dataset and the CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI benchmarks for multimodal sentiment analysis. Across a range of downstream prediction tasks and missing-modality settings, TRACE consistently outperforms prior multimodal fusion approaches, demonstrating improved robustness to severe modality missingness and more reliable cross-modal representations.
Ziwen Kan, Yishuo Chen, Kecheng Li +7
Jun 4, 2026cs.LG

TS-ICL: A Flexible Time-Indexed Foundation Model for Time Series via In-Context Learning

Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models. Yet, current approaches primarily focus on forecasting, while real-world time series are often irregularly and partially observed, requiring models that can jointly forecast, impute missing values, and handle degraded sampling conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce TS-ICL, a novel probabilistic In-Context Learning encoder--regressor Transformer that unifies forecasting and imputation. TS-ICL formulates time series tasks as timestamp-aligned regression and naturally incorporates covariates by training on synthetic dependency structures generated from a novel causal data prior. Empirically, TS-ICL achieves a new state-of-the-art in imputation, while remaining competitive with leading forecasting foundation models across both univariate and covariate-aware benchmarks. It shows particularly strong performance in forecasting with partially observed look-back windows.
Etienne Le Naour, Tahar Nabil, Adrien Petralia
Jun 3, 2026cs.AI

Harnessing Generalist Agents for Contextualized Time Series

Time series are often embedded in rich contexts that are essential for holistic modeling. Moreover, real-world practitioners often require end-to-end workflows for analyzing temporal dynamics, where widely studied tasks such as forecasting are only one step in a broader solution loop. While generalist AI agents offer a promising interface for such workflows under complex contexts, they still operate primarily in textual spaces that are not fully aligned with structured temporal signals. In this work, we introduce TimeClaw, an agentic harness framework for time series that equips generalist LLM agents with the time series-native runtime support needed for contextualized temporal reasoning. TimeClaw integrates executable temporal tools for grounded and auditable analysis, experience-driven capability evolution for creating reusable analytical routines, and episodic multimodal memory for retrieving relevant reasoning traces. Together, these components unlock harnessed open-ended temporal reasoning with contextual information. Extensive evaluation on multiple benchmarks covering diverse tasks across energy, finance, weather, traffic, and other real-world domains demonstrates improved performance of TimeClaw. Code is available at https://github.com/iDEA-iSAIL-Lab-UIUC/TimeClaw.
Zihao Li, Kaifeng Jin, Yuanchen Bei +8
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

Generating Financial Time Series by Matching Random Convolutional Features

Generating realistic financial time series is challenging as training data is often limited to a single historical path. With such scarce data, overfitting is hard to avoid, especially under adversarial training where a trained discriminator can memorize the training samples. To mitigate this, recent approaches train generators to minimize the discrepancy between untrained feature representations of real and generated time series. In these works, the feature maps are based on path signatures, which can fail to capture relevant time series properties at tractable truncation depths. In this work, we instead train generators by matching random convolutional features of real and generated time series. Existing random convolutional feature maps, such as Rocket and Hydra, have been shown to provide informative representations of real-world time series, but cannot supervise generative models because they are non-differentiable. We introduce SOCK (SOft Competing Kernels), a fully differentiable random convolutional feature map, suited to train generative time series models. We show that generators trained by matching random SOCK features consistently outperform signature and diffusion baselines across a wide range of small-sample financial datasets. We further demonstrate SOCK's expressiveness on two-sample hypothesis testing and time series classification tasks, where SOCK matches or outperforms existing unsupervised feature maps.
Konrad J. Mueller, Nikita Zozoulenko, Ben Wood +2
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

REGEN: Reference-Guided Synthetic Multivariate Time Series Generation for Forecasting

Training robust multivariate time series forecasting models requires large, diverse corpora, yet many real-world domains provide only a handful of observed sequences. Existing generators fail to resolve this mismatch: prior-based approaches (e.g., CauKer, TimePFN) produce domain-agnostic samples, while data-driven methods (e.g., TimeGAN) treat references as black-box supervision, forfeiting explicit control over periodic structure, local variability, and cross-variable dynamics. We propose ReGeN, a reference-guided generative pipeline that treats observed sequences not as examples to imitate, but as structural scaffolds for controllable synthesis. ReGeN decomposes each reference into three interpretable components: a phase-aligned periodic backbone capturing dominant domain morphology; per-variable stochastic residuals modeled with a deep-kernel Gaussian process; and lag-aware cross-variable dependencies injected through a structural causal model with fitted coupling coefficients. Sampling these components at controllable temperature broadens distributional coverage while preserving domain-grounded structure. We show that ReGeN-generated data consistently substitutes for real sibling data with minimal forecasting degradation, and in strongly periodic domains such as traffic, can outperform the real source itself. We further show that a foundation model pretrained on ReGeN corpora outperforms those pretrained on prior-based and data-driven synthetic alternatives. This suggests that in low-data regimes, how reference data is structurally exploited can matter as much as how much data is available.
Moulik Gupta, Dhruv Kumar, Murari Mandal +1
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

Signed Dual Attention: Capturing Signed Dependencies in Time Series Forecasting

Initially developed for natural language processing, Transformer architectures and attention mechanisms are now central to a wide range of deep learning models, including applications in time series forecasting. A standard attention mechanism, however, implicitly assumes homophilic interactions, limiting its ability to model data with positive and negative dependencies, such as time series. In this work, we introduce the Signed Dual Attention, a novel attention formulation that captures both positive and negative relational patterns without additional parameters. By leveraging a dual message-passing scheme inspired by correlation structures, Signed Dual Attention propagates both supportive and contrastive information within a single shared block, effectively achieving the expressiveness of two head attention without additional parameters. This module can be seamlessly integrated into existing architectures and can yield performance gains in certain situations, requiring signed relational modeling. This approach opens a pathway toward more expressive and parameter-efficient transformers.
Balthazar Courvoisier, Tristan Cazenave
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

ADAPTOOD: Uncertainty-Aware Fine-Tuning for Out-of-Distribution ECG Time Series Models

Data samples used for training often differ from those encountered during fine-tuning and deployment, and while ML models show promise, their performance remains limited when only small annotated datasets are available. Performance often degrades under distribution shifts caused by diverse sensors, populations, and application settings. Although pre-training helps, models frequently encounter out-of-distribution (OOD) data in real-world settings, leading to reduced robustness. Existing adaptation methods usually assume fixed distribution shifts and struggle when multiple types or severities occur. In particular, they overlook shift severity, for example treating adaptation to a large familiar dataset the same as adaptation to a small dataset with a new task, which limits generalisation. To address this, we propose ADAPTOOD, a novel framework that leverages data uncertainty to quantify distribution shift severity and guide fine-tuning for time series. This uncertainty measures how strongly samples from the target deployment distribution deviate from the pre-training distribution, providing a direct signal of OOD severity. Our framework combines this uncertainty with low-rank model updates and adaptive hyperparameter optimisation to improve adaptation. We show that ADAPTOOD achieves up to 7% higher accuracy and 12.9% higher precision than existing methods in OOD tasks, maintaining strong performance as distribution shift severity increases.
Sotirios Vavaroutas, Yu Yvonne Wu, Ali Etemad +1
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Stationarity-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting relies on historical patterns, but real-world series often exhibit non-stationarity and regime shifts that challenge fully parametric forecasters. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent work augments forecasters by retrieving relevant historical segments and using them as external evidence at inference time. However, due to the intrinsic non-stationarity of real-world time series, a highly similar past segment does not necessarily imply a similar future, rendering similarity-only retrieval brittle and prone to redundancy. We propose Stationarity-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting (SARAF), a framework that adaptively balances relevance and diversity in retrieval. SARAF first forms a candidate pool via temporal similarity with time-aligned enhancement, then applies a diversity-aware selection strategy to cover heterogeneous historical regimes, with the diversification strength automatically modulated by dataset-level stationarity. Moreover, SARAF uses stationarity-aware aggregation to fuse the retrieved futures. Extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets show that SARAF achieves competitive forecasting performance and improves average accuracy and robustness over strong baselines, with particularly clear benefits under challenging non-stationary settings. Code: https://github.com/ShiqiaoZhou/SARAF.
Shiqiao Zhou, Holger Schöner, Zipeng Wu +3
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

AnchorMoE: Interpretable Time Series Classification via Anchor-Routed MoE

Multivariate time series classification (MTSC) is pivotal in high-stakes domains, such as clinical diagnosis and industrial fault detection, where safe deployment necessitates transparent decision-making. However, isolating the temporal segments that drive model predictions is challenging because discriminative signals in real-world time series are typically sparse, heterogeneous, and heavily obscured by background noise. This paper, therefore, proposes AnchorMoE, an interpretable-by-construction classification framework. Built upon a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, AnchorMoE encodes multi-view representations of local patches and routes them to specialized experts, ensuring that the final prediction is formulated as an exact additive decomposition over the input segments, facilitating ante-hoc transparency rather than relying on post-hoc estimations. To maintain the reliability of this decomposition under sparse signal distributions, we introduce a geometric orthogonality constraint that penalizes representational redundancy, compelling distinct experts to specialize in heterogeneous predictive patterns. Furthermore, an uncertainty-aware reliability gate is designed to dynamically calibrate the contribution of each segment, effectively suppressing residual background noise. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that AnchorMoE achieves highly competitive classification performance while faithfully grounding its decisions in the raw time series.
Tao Xie, Zexi Tan, Haoyi Xiao +5
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

TSQAgent: Rating Time Series Data Quality via Dedicated Agentic Reasoning

Assessing the quality of time series (TS) data is fundamental yet inherently challenging due to the multifaceted nature of quality dimensions. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for TS quality assessment via pairwise comparison and per-dimension evaluation. However, existing approaches rely on manually predefined quality dimensions and purely text-based reasoning, leaving it unknown whether LLMs can identify truly relevant quality dimensions or perform grounded and quantitative quality comparisons. To investigate this, we construct TSQBench, a dedicated benchmark for evaluating LLMs on two progressive capabilities: (i) understanding and identifying relevant quality dimensions, and (ii) performing quality comparison under specific dimensions. Our analysis reveals that current LLMs consistently struggle with both dimension identification and evidence-grounded quality comparison. To address these limitations, we propose TSQAgent, a novel agentic reasoning framework for TS quality rating consisting of three collaborative roles: Perceiver for focused dimension selection, Inspector for dimension-wise quantitative analysis, and Adjudicator that aggregates and refines the final judgment. In particular, we introduce an agentic reasoning strategy that instills the ability to identify and prioritize the most relevant quality dimensions, and further propose an agent workflow equipped with external analytical tools to enable precise quantitative comparisons over selected dimensions. Experiments on both the proposed benchmark and eleven real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework not only substantially improves LLMs' capabilities in quality understanding and quantitative comparison but also effectively translates these improvements into better quality-aware data selection, leading to enhanced downstream performance and data efficiency.
Shunyu Wu, Dan Li, Haozheng Ye +6
Jun 1, 2026stat.ML

ProbRes: Volatility Learning for Probabilistic Time-Series Forecasting

Probabilistic time series forecasting has attracted increasing attention in financial applications due to the need to quantify risk and uncertainty in future observations. We propose ProbRes, a post-hoc probabilistic calibration method that explicitly learns and incorporates volatility dynamics into probabilistic forecasting, enabling effective handling of heteroskedastic data. During training, ProbRes employs two architecture-agnostic modules to separately model the conditional mean and conditional volatility. At the inference stage, it generates predictive distributions by resampling normalized residuals. ProbRes is applicable to both univariate and multivariate time series and remains robust under a wide range of error distributions, including non-Gaussian innovations with conditional heteroskedasticity. Theoretical results demonstrate ProbRes's validity and experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that ProbRes accurately captures predictive distributions and produces well-calibrated prediction intervals.
Tingting Wang, Yunyi Zhang, Benyou Wang
Jun 1, 2026cs.LG

Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series Benchmarks Are Mostly Univariate

Many recent multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) models incorporate cross-channel modeling, under the implicit assumption that the structure of anomalies may be spread across multiple channels. We evaluate this assumption on eight widely used public benchmarks by introducing a per-segment diagnostic framework that flags, for each labeled anomaly, whether at least one channel deviates individually from its normal history, whether the cross-channel correlation structure changes, or both. The framework shows that no cross-channel rupture occurs without an accompanying univariate deviation across a range of reasonable thresholds. A complementary metric also reveals that on six of the eight benchmarks, at least half of the labeled anomaly segments deviate univariately on 89% to 100% of their timesteps, reaching 100% on three of these datasets. To verify that our framework captures cross-channel structure when present, we construct synthetic data of phase-shifted sinusoidal channels with shared noise. Each anomalous segment is altered through one of two channel-wise corruptions that preserve the per-channel marginal distribution while breaking cross-channel structure, and our framework correctly characterizes these segments as cross-channel-only. On these data, channel-dependent (CD) models successfully exploit the cross-channel signal whereas channel-independent (CI) ones fail. The CI/CD comparison of a recent SOTA detector on real benchmarks further confirms that CD modeling brings no measurable gain. We conclude that current MTSAD benchmarks are unsuitable for validating cross-channel modeling capabilities, and we call for the development of more structurally diverse evaluation sets. The code for this study is publicly available.
Marc Pinet, Julien Cumin, Samuel Berlemont +1
Jun 1, 2026cs.LG

Why Do Time Series Models Need Long Context Windows?

Modern deep learning models for forecasting groups of time series rely on increasingly longer observation windows. However, the benefit of increasing the window size is often simply attributed to capturing long-range dependencies, and broader discussion on how global forecasting models leverage input observations has been limited. In this paper, we show that forecasting groups of time series involves two objectives: (i) generative process identification (GPI), i.e., inferring the specific process generating the input sequence, and (ii) conditional forecasting (CF), i.e., predicting future values given input observations. From this perspective, optimal predictions can be interpreted as an average over plausible data-generating processes, weighted by their likelihood given the input window. This suggests another explanation for the benefits of long context windows: they reduce the uncertainty about which specific process is generating the input time series during operation. We prove that even for processes with memory length PP, an input window size strictly larger than PP is necessary to achieve the minimum attainable error. Finally, we show how decoupling GPI and CF can improve computational scalability without compromising accuracy. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data validate our insights and their relevance for designing forecasting architectures.
Luca Butera, Giovanni De Felice, Andrea Cini +1
Jun 1, 2026cs.LG

Estimating Mutual Information between Time Series and Temporal Event Sequences Across Diverse Analysis Tasks

Pairwise dependence measures such as correlation and causality are fundamental to temporal data mining, yet there is still no principled and robust way to quantify dependence between heterogeneous data types, especially between continuous time series and discrete temporal event sequences. Existing approaches rely on ad hoc transformations or mutual-information estimators that are highly sensitive to quantization, repeated values, and event redundancy, leading to biased or unstable results in practice. We propose a nonparametric mutual information estimator that directly measures the dependence between time series and event sequences without data transformation, learning, or ad hoc discretization. Our method models the continuous-discrete duality of real-world time series to handle quantization and repeated-value artifacts and introduces a latent event clustering strategy to mitigate bias from event co-occurrence and redundancy. Together, these yield a robust and unified framework that bridges discrete and continuous mutual information. We evaluate the proposed estimator on four representative tasks: discrete-continuous time-delayed mutual information for causality analysis, global and local temporal repetition discovery, discrete covariate selection for time series forecasting, and continuous feature selection for classification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show consistent improvements over existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a general-purpose dependence operator for heterogeneous temporal data, similar to Pearson correlation for homogeneous time series. Code available at: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification
Haoji Hu, Huaqing Mao, Yijun Lin +4
May 31, 2026cs.CL

TimeSage-MT: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Time Series Reasoning

Time series data inform critical decisions across many real-world domains. While large language model (LLM) agents can analyze data through natural language and tools, it remains unclear whether they can conduct reliable time series analysis across multi-turn conversations. Existing benchmarks focus on single-step tasks such as forecasting and anomaly detection, overlooking practical workflows where user goals evolve, agents must build on prior analyses, and conclusions emerge from accumulated evidence. In this work, we introduce TimeSage-MT, a multi-turn benchmark for agentic time series reasoning with 240 tasks and 2,680 dialogue turns across 8 real-world domains, spanning basic exploration to decision-oriented analysis. TimeSage-MT is built through a reproducible pipeline that converts real-world time series data into multi-turn conversations with verifiable answers. It provides a unified evaluation protocol and public leaderboard for comparing time series agentic systems. To demonstrate the benchmark's utility, we evaluate frontier LLMs alongside TimeSage, a novel structured agent equipped with a comprehensive time series skill library. The results show sharp performance drops on decision-oriented tasks, driven by failures in memory, uncertainty handling, and domain-based decision making. TimeSage-MT exposes critical gaps in current agentic reasoning and provides a rigorous foundation for future development.
Yaxuan Kong, Qingren Yao, Yuqi Nie +7
May 31, 2026cs.LG

Time Series as Language: A Universal Tokenizer for General-Purpose Time Series Foundation Models

While Next-Token Prediction (NTP) has unified LLM pretraining, its adaptation to unbounded, continuous time series (TS) remains open. To bridge the gap, we introduce UniTok, a universal tokenizer that transforms TS into discrete tokens, and UniTok-FM, a foundation model pretrained via NTP on these tokens. UniTok-FM is a general-purpose foundation model that supports zero-shot and prompt-boosted forecasting, as well as few-shot generation and classification via training-free in-context inference--a capability not achieved by prior works. Technically, UniTok is a vector-quantized autoencoder incorporating prefix normalization for scale stabilization, a progressive-resolution causal architecture for encoding and decoding, and a structure-preserving reconstruction loss for training. UniTok-FM adopts an off-the-shelf LLM architecture without TS-specific modifications. Instead of pretraining on isolated TS, it performs NTP on context windows formed by multiple series with similar patterns, aiming to capture their shared dynamics. Experiments on forecasting, generation, and classification show that a single unified UniTok-FM consistently outperforms statistical and supervised baselines, achieves competitive performance with task-specific foundation models, and uniquely enables training-free in-context inference across tasks.
Yunhao Zhang, Ruiying Qi, Jiale Zheng +3
May 31, 2026cs.LG

FAiT: Frequency-Aware Inverted Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

While Transformer-based architectures have established themselves as a dominant paradigm in Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF), their core self-attention mechanism inherently functions as a low-pass filter, systematically smoothing out high-frequency signals vital for sharp local changes. Recent advancements have increasingly incorporated frequency-domain operations to address this bias, however, most existing designs rely on fixed spectral bases and apply sequence-wise (uniform) modulation, implicitly assuming a time-invariant frequency response. This overlooks a key property of real-world series that their spectral characteristics often evolve over time, making uniform modulation insufficient for capturing fine-grained temporal dynamics. To tackle these limitations, we propose FAiT, a Frequency-Aware inverted Transformer. Specifically, FAiT rectifies the spectral bias internally through Inverted Attention, which interprets the attention map as a learnable low-pass operator and constructs a dedicated complementary high-pass branch by inverting the attention matrix to recover attenuated transient signals. Furthermore, FAiT introduces Dynamic Temporal-Frequency Modulation (DTFM), which synthesizes instance-conditioned weights to adaptively re-calibrate the energy of spectral sub-bands, enabling fine-grained control over evolving multi-scale patterns. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that FAiT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art Transformer-based and frequency-enhanced baselines, while maintaining computational efficiency.
Peng He, Yao Liu, Yanglei Gan +3
May 31, 2026cs.LG

ChronosAD: Leveraging Time Series Foundation Models for Accurate Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is a crucial task in various domains, including finance, healthcare, and industry. However, existing methods often struggle to generalize across different datasets, especially when anomalies are subtle or context-dependent. To solve this issue, we introduce ChronosAD, a novel architecture for anomaly detection that uses a time series foundation model as a feature extractor. Specifically, it employs a two-stage pipeline: first, it uses the foundation model to extract embeddings for each time series in a zero-shot manner. Then, a custom-developed Temporal Block, composed of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Multi-Head Attention, refines these embeddings to capture temporal dependencies and highlight salient patterns. Unlike previous approaches, our model requires minimal task-specific tuning and demonstrates robust generalization across a wide range of domains, including industrial, medical, cyber-physical, and automotive systems. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmarks show that ChronosAD outperforms existing methods by 4.72% in AUC and 6.60% in AP on average. The source code is available at https://github.com/intelligolabs/ChronosAD.
Uzair Khan, Luigi Capogrosso, Francesco Biondani +4
May 31, 2026cs.LG

Feature to Dynamics: Feature-space to Autoregression strategy for Zero-shot Time Series Forecasting

Zero-shot time series forecasting aims to predict future values for previously unseen series, requiring models to generalize temporal dynamics beyond the training distribution. While recent foundation models achieve strong in-domain performance through large-scale pretraining, their effectiveness often relies on broad data coverage and implicit pattern memorization, which can limit generalization when data are scarce or source and target domains are disjoint. In this work, we propose FSA, a feature-to-strategy framework for controlled zero-shot univariate forecasting. Instead of directly modeling raw sequences in the observation space, FSA learns a structured mapping from an interpretable feature space to an autoregressive strategy space. This design introduces explicit inductive biases that disentangle global trends, periodic components, and local temporal dynamics, enabling the model to capture transferable time-series structure with fewer data assumptions. Empirical results show that, under identical pretraining data, training protocol, and comparable parameter budgets, FSA outperforms Transformer-based architectures in our controlled zero-shot setting.
Yifan Wu, Junjie Wu, Kai Wu +2
May 29, 2026cs.LG

Learning Hyperspherical Time-Frequency Representations for Time-Series Out-of-Distribution Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for time-series data remains comparatively underexplored compared to vision and language, with a limited principled understanding of how supervised time-series representations can be leveraged for reliable detection under distributional shifts. This work formulates time-series OOD detection as representation learning with hyperspherical embeddings, where class-conditional structure is induced by a von Mises-Fisher (vMF) likelihood-based objective on the unit sphere. The learned representation combines time- and frequency-domain views of the input signal via domain-specific encoders, integrating them into a joint embedding space for OOD detection. Detection uses distance-based scores over the learned embeddings, including k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) and Mahalanobis scores. We evaluate the approach at scale on the complete UCR and UEA time-series archives under a cross-dataset protocol. Empirical results show consistent improvements under both k-NN and Mahalanobis scoring over strong contrastive learning and post-hoc baselines in the same setting. Code is available at https://github.com/tiiuae/hypertf-time-series-ood.
Willian T. Lunardi, Samridha Shrestha, Martin Andreoni
May 29, 2026cs.LG

Generalizing Multi-Scale Time-Series Modeling with a Single Operator

Multi-scale modeling has emerged as an effective design principle for time-series forecasting by capturing temporal dynamics at multiple resolutions. As no principled foundation has been established in the literature, we unify existing scaling methods into a scaling operator family, revealing a fundamental limitation of existing approaches: reliance on fixed and discrete scaling. To address this limitation, we propose SiGMA (Single Generalized Multi-scale Architecture), which enables distance-aware scaling via the learnable discrete Gaussian (LDG) kernel grounded in scale-space theory. We evaluate SiGMA comprehensively on long- and short-term forecasting benchmarks against state-of-the-art multi-scale baselines. SiGMA outperforms all competitors on both tasks, especially achieving the best performance in 13 out of 16 long-term evaluation settings. Beyond accuracy, SiGMA significantly improves training speed by up to 5.3 times and reduces memory consumption by up to 3.8 times over the strongest competitors. Code is available at https://github.com/cheonwoolee/SiGMA.
Cheonwoo Lee, Dooho Lee, Doyun Choi +1
May 29, 2026cs.LG

SRT: Super-Resolution for Time Series via Disentangled Rectified Flow

Fine-grained time series data with high temporal resolution is critical for accurate analytics across a wide range of applications. However, the acquisition of such data is often limited by cost and feasibility. This problem can be tackled by reconstructing high-resolution signals from low-resolution inputs based on specific priors, known as super-resolution. While extensively studied in computer vision, directly transferring image super-resolution techniques to time series is not trivial. To address this challenge at a fundamental level, we propose Super-Resolution for Time series (SRT), a novel framework that reconstructs temporal patterns lost in low-resolution inputs via disentangled rectified flow. SRT decomposes the input into trend and seasonal components, aligns them to the target resolution using an implicit neural representation, and leverages a novel cross-resolution attention mechanism to guide the generation of high-resolution details. We further introduce SRT-large, a scaled-up version with extensive pre-training, which enables strong zero-shot super-resolution capability. Extensive experiments on nine public datasets demonstrate that SRT and SRT-large consistently outperform existing methods across multiple scale factors, showing both robust performance and the effectiveness of each component in our architecture.
Jufang Duan, Shenglong Xiao, Yuren Zhang
May 29, 2026cs.LG

STEP: Learning STructured Embeddings for Progressive Time Series

We present a novel method for learning interpretable representations of progressive time series, that is, data capturing irreversible state transitions such as degradation or task completion. Our approach uses a self-supervised contrastive objective to learn a low-dimensional latent space whose geometry is itself the interpretation: each observation becomes a point on a manifold anchored between two fixed orthogonal prototype vectors, and a trajectory becomes a path across that manifold. From this structure we read a latent compass, the polar coordinates (θ, r) of the latent vector, in which θ tracks the progression of the underlying state (e.g., from healthy to failed) and r identifies the active mode (e.g., the operating condition), without any proxy labels. We evaluate the approach against the state of the art on diverse domains, including industrial degradation, robotic tasks, and neural activity, validating three key capabilities: (1) end-state prediction, (2) multi-step forecasting, and (3) interpretable phase separation. Our method matches or improves over black-box counterparts on all of these while providing transparency about the underlying mechanisms. A simple linear regressor on top of the latent compass coordinates is competitive with deep architectures, direct quantitative evidence that the underlying state is encoded in a geometrically accessible form.
Lucas Thil, Jesse Read, Rim Kaddah +1
May 28, 2026stat.ML

Leave a Window Out: Modifying the Jackknife for Predictive Inference in Time Series

Conformal prediction methods enjoy strong theoretical and empirical predictive inference performance, provided the data is exchangeable and is treated symmetrically during training. However, these assumptions are impractical in many settings, such as time series, where temporal dependence violates exchangeability and it is preferable to use predictors that leverage dependence by treating data asymmetrically. Recent work shows that split conformal prediction is robust to these issues, but sample splitting can reduce accuracy, motivating the study of methods that do not rely on data splitting in the time series setting. In this work, we show that the vanilla leave-one-out jackknife can suffer arbitrary loss of coverage even in canonical time series models with mild temporal dependence. As a remedy, we propose a modification tailored to such settings, which we term the leave-a-window-out (LWO) method, and show that it can achieve valid coverage provided that the model-fitting procedure satisfies mild stability properties. Our proofs are based on quantifying the degree to which the data departs from cyclic exchangeability, which we introduce new coefficients to measure. Experiments on time series demonstrate that our method often enjoys valid coverage when the vanilla jackknife fails to cover, while producing much narrower intervals than split conformal prediction.
Hanyang Jiang, Rina Foygel Barber, Ashwin Pananjady +1
May 27, 2026cs.LG

Online Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Uncertainty-Driven Dual-Expert Calibration

Irregular multivariate time series forecasting is critical in many real-world applications, where time series are irregularly sampled and exhibit dynamically evolving missingness patterns. Although existing methods perform well in offline settings, they often suffer from significant performance degradation when deployed online due to dynamic shifts in data distribution. Maintaining forecasting capability in such dynamic scenarios typically necessitates online adaptation techniques. Since irregular sampling fundamentally undermines temporal continuity and periodicity, we cannot leverage these widely studied characteristics from regular MTS for online learning. To this end, we study the problem of online IMTS forecasting and propose Under-Cali, an uncertainty-driven dual-expert calibration framework consisting of three core components: an uncertainty estimator, a dual-expert calibration module, and an adaptive routing module. We design an uncertainty estimator that serves as the core control signal to jointly manage inference and adaptation processes. In our framework, the uncertainty estimator first assesses uncertainty for each incoming batch. The adaptive routing module then directs samples with high uncertainty to the unreliable expert for calibration, while low uncertainty samples remain with the reliable expert. Subsequently, the system updates the reliable expert and the uncertainty estimator using well-calibrated reliable samples, and updates the unreliable expert with challenging samples, enabling stable and efficient online learning. Under-Cali keeps the source forecasting model frozen and performs adaptation only through a lightweight, model-agnostic calibration module, enabling efficient adaptation. Extensive experiments on IMTS benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements with low computational cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/HaonanWen/Under-Cali.
Haonan Wen, Hanyang Chen, Songhe Feng
May 27, 2026cs.LG

Detecting Diffusion-Generated Time Series Under Generator Shift

The boundary between real and diffusion-generated time series is becoming increasingly difficult to draw, yet detection in this domain remains underexplored, especially when the generator is unknown. We compare white-box detection, which requires access to the generator, against black-box detection, which operates on the raw signal alone. The white-box approach, a reconstruction-based detector adapted from the image domain, works well in in-distribution but breaks down under generator shift: reconstruction-based detection in images succeeds because large generic generators provide a near-universal reconstruction prior, and no analogous generator exists for time series. In contrast, a simple off-the-shelf classifier used as a black-box detector performs remarkably well, achieving an average F1 of 79.2, a 22.1% relative improvement over the white-box approach, and a TPR@1%FPR of 57.2. Diffusion-generated time series detection is therefore not a direct transfer of the image domain problem. This work provides the first systematic exploration of white-box and black-box detection for diffusion-generated time series. We close by identifying several open and promising directions.
Zhi Wen Soi, Aditya Shankar, Gert Lek +4
May 27, 2026cs.CV

Inpainting-Style Conditional Diffusion for Multivariable Time Series Forecasting

In this paper, we propose a novel conditional diffusion-based framework for multivariable time-series solar power forecasting. The proposed method reformulates temporal PV data as structured two-dimensional representations (images) using a sliding-window patch construction, enabling the application of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) within a unified spatiotemporal learning paradigm. A key contribution of this work is the formulation of solar forecasting as an inpainting problem, where future time steps are treated as missing regions to be reconstructed. This is achieved through a mask-based conditional diffusion mechanism, in which historical observations are preserved as conditioning context while the target (future) region is progressively corrupted and subsequently recovered via reverse diffusion. The model learns to generate coherent future sequences conditioned on observed data, effectively performing time-series inpainting. To fully utilize all available features and ensure compatibility with U-Net architectural constraints, a zero-padding strategy is introduced to construct fixed-size inputs. The model is trained using a supervised denoising objective to predict injected noise, enabling accurate iterative reconstruction during the reverse process. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark PV dataset, including GEFCom2014, demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high forecasting accuracy, particularly for short-term horizons. The results highlight the effectiveness of integrating diffusion-based generative modeling with an inpainting formulation for robust, flexible, and high-fidelity solar power forecasting.
Kourosh Kiani, S. M. Muyeen
May 27, 2026cs.RO

Identifying Explicit Parsimonious Piece-wise Polynomial Relationships in Industrial time-series: Application to manipulator robots

This paper addresses the problem of identifying parsimonious explicit piece-wise polynomial relationships that might involve a relatively large number of raw features. The algorithm leverages a recently proposed identification algorithm that yields parsimonious implicit relationships enabling to derive normality characterization in the context of anomaly detection and localization. The algorithm proposed in this paper goes a step further by deriving explicit piece-wise representations that are built using the set of polynomials involved in the implicit representations. The framework is illustrated on the problem of identifying parsimonious explicit representations of the inverse model of a 6-axis manipulator robot. Moreover, further experiments on a 4-axis robot are also shown which are designed to investigate the generalization capability of parsimonious models compared to state-of-the-art DNNs structures, when models face unseen contexts of use.
Mazen Alamir, Sacha Clavel
May 27, 2026cs.LG

QuITE: Query-Based Irregular Time Series Embedding

Irregular Multivariate Time Series (IMTS) are common in practice, yet their irregular sampling complicates effective modeling. Existing approaches typically either (i) design specialized architectures that limit the reuse of proven Multivariate Time Series (MTS) models, or (ii) map IMTS onto regular temporal grids through interpolation, which may distort temporal dynamics by introducing artificial values. To address these limitations, we propose a new input-embedding-based approach. We identify that the key bottleneck lies not in the backbone architecture, but in conventional embedding layers that assume uniform sampling. In this work, we introduce QuITE (Query-Based Irregular Time Series Embedding), a simple yet effective plug-and-play embedding module for IMTS. QuITE employs learnable query tokens to aggregate irregular observations through a single self-attention layer, directly producing backbone-compatible latent representations without artificial value generation or architectural modification. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks show that QuITE consistently improves MTS models, yielding average relative gains of up to 54.7%54.7\% in forecasting and 15.8%15.8\% in classification across diverse datasets and backbone architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/Meaningfull9502/QuITE.
Junghoon Lim
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Falcon-X: A Time Series Foundation Model for Heterogeneous Multivariate Modeling

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are transforming the forecasting paradigm through large-scale cross-domain pretraining. However, most existing TSFMs remain univariate, and recent efforts to enable cross-variate modeling still operate directly within the raw variate space. This design introduces fundamental limitations in semantic alignment and relational expressivity. Specifically, raw-space group mixing lacks a dedicated mechanism to align heterogeneous physical quantities, while standard non-negative attention fails to capture the complex synergistic and antagonistic interactions ubiquitous in real-world systems. To address these challenges, we propose Falcon-X, decouples variates from the raw space and maps them into a unified latent prototype space. Falcon-X employs a Unified Prototype Diff-Attention mechanism that explicitly evaluates both positive and negative semantic affinities to explicitly align heterogeneous variates. Cross-variate interactions are then efficiently performed within this shared space via Latent Entity Attention, naturally facilitating zero-shot structural transfer. Finally, a Variate Reassembly Router robustly reconstructs variate-specific trajectories via a request-and-dispatch mechanism. Extensive evaluations on the GIFT-Eval and fev-bench benchmarks demonstrate that Falcon-X achieves excellent forecasting performance, offering a principled and scalable paradigm for complex multivariate environments. Falcon-X is publicly released to support future research.
Yiding Liu, Yifan Hu, Hongjie Xia +5
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Federated Learning for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection in Industrial Automation

Federated learning (FL) has broadened the horizon for multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD). However, benchmarking such anomaly detection methods within FL paradigm poses data-centric challenges. The existing datasets do not counteract these challenges since they do not simultaneously provide sufficient scale, accurate labels, and freedom from common flaws. In addition, the role of cyclic process behavior, which is common in discrete industrial automation, remains underexplored for MTSAD for the current state of research. This paper aims to shed more light on the literature and address these gaps by introducing a dataset designed with cyclic dynamics arising from the repetitive nature of discrete automation processes and evaluates selected MTSAD methods on both the proposed dataset and a public benchmark dataset.
Khayyam Nosrati, Martin Uray, Saverio Messineo +2
May 26, 2026cs.LG

High-Quality Synthetic Financial Time-Series using a GAN-Diffusion Framework

In recent years, financial institutions and firms have increasingly adopted synthetic data to address data scarcity and to generate counterfactual market scenarios. However, reproducing all the statistical properties of financial time series, commonly known as stylized facts, remains an open challenge for many existing general-purpose architectures. In this paper, we present a quality-aware generative framework that combines two classes of generative methods, demonstrating how their integration addresses existing limitations while enhancing the realism of synthetic data. Specifically, we first introduce CoMeTS-GAN (Correlated Multivariate Time Series GAN), a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (C-GAN) designed to jointly generate mid-price and volume time-series for correlated stocks. We then show how our GAN architecture can be incorporated into state-of-the-art diffusion models to enhance the quality of generated correlation structures. Specifically, the GAN's Critic serves as a quality evaluation module that guides the diffusion process, enforcing learned correlation structures in the generated time-series. Our framework offers a lightweight and responsive solution for realistic stock market simulation, explicitly modeling inter-asset correlation structures. We experimentally validate our framework against leading generative architectures, showing that it more effectively captures the stylized facts of stock markets and models inter-asset correlations.
Giuseppe Masi, Andrea Coletta, Novella Bartolini
May 26, 2026stat.ML

Triangular-Reference Schrödinger Bridges for Time Series Generation

Schrödinger bridges for time series (SBTS) generate synthetic paths by projecting, in relative entropy, a Brownian reference onto the path laws that match the joint distribution of the data on the observation grid. The Brownian reference, however, fixes the quadratic variation of the generated paths, which is restrictive when stochastic volatility, correlated noise, or rank-deficient covariance structures must be reproduced. We introduce "Triangular-Reference Schrödinger Bridges for Time Series" (TR-SBTS), which keeps the entropy-projection backbone of SBTS but replaces the Brownian reference by a triangular, volatility-informed, intervalwise frozen reference on a state augmented with latent covariance descriptors. The construction remains a single entropy projection on the augmented state: the minimiser is the hh-transform of the reference, and on each frozen interval the optimal drift has the logarithmic-gradient form b⋆(t,x)=A ∇log⁡H(t,x)b^\star(t,x)=A\,\nabla\log H(t,x), intrinsic to the active covariance directions when the frozen covariance AA is degenerate. We prove stability of the frozen approximation and consistency of the associated regularised kernel estimators, describe a reference-aware Nadaraya--Watson implementation of the conditional next-increment law, and evaluate the construction on numerical experiments.
Gabriele Bocchi
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Unicorn: Scaling High-Dimensional Time Series Forecasting via Universal Correlation Modeling

Modern time series architectures face a fundamental trade-off: channel-independent models scale well with increasing data volume but ignore critical inter-channel dependencies, while channel-dependent models are expressive but remain ``dimension-bounded'', struggling to generalize across heterogeneous datasets.To bridge this gap, we introduce Unicorn (Universal Correlation Network), a framework for scalable, multi-dataset pretraining on high-dimensional time series. At the core of Unicorn is a latent prototype codebook that decouples correlation modeling from specific channel identities. By projecting heterogeneous channels into a shared latent space, UniCorN learns identity-agnostic, reusable interaction patterns that transfer across domains with diverse dimensionalities and semantics. Extensive experiments show that Unicorn significantly outperforms state-of-the-art forecasting architectures, particularly in few-shot transfer scenarios, offering a scalable path toward multivariate time series foundation models.
Haochen Yuan, Yichen Song, Yunbo Wang +1
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Time Series Causal Discovery via Context-Conditioned and Causality-Augmented Pretraining

Causal discovery from time series is critical for many real-world applications, such as tracing the root causes of anomalies. Existing approaches typically rely on dataset-specific optimization, making it difficult to transfer their causal discovery capabilities to new time series governed by diverse causal mechanisms. In this paper, we propose \textbf{PTCD}, a novel \textbf{P}retraining framework for \textbf{T}ime-series \textbf{C}ausal \textbf{D}iscovery, which improves cross-task generalization through context-conditioned modeling and transferable causal augmentation. To model complex temporal causal dependencies, PTCD employs a dual-scale iterative attention mechanism to capture window-level causal relationships, and a Gaussian mixture with a context-level routing mechanism to handle heterogeneous exogenous distributions. To further address distribution shifts across causal graphs, PTCD adopts a pretraining paradigm on synthetic datasets that integrates intervention-based learning and a causal mixup strategy, promoting stable causal discovery and stronger generalization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets demonstrate that PTCD excels in both causal discovery and root cause identification.
Biao Ouyang, Tengxue Zhang, Zhihao Zhuang +3
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Distribution-Aware Conformal Prediction: A Framework for generating efficient prediction intervals for time series

We present Distribution-aware Conformal Prediction (DCP), a unified framework integrating probabilistic predictors like Monte Carlo dropout, deep ensembles, and quantile regression with score-agnostic conformal calibration to produce valid and efficient prediction intervals. Leveraging a numerical inversion approach to construct interval bounds, DCP accommodates arbitrary combinations of distribution generating predictors and nonconformity scores. Benchmark analysis on synthetic and real-world time series data demonstrate DCP's ability to adaptively calibrate prediction intervals under varying uncertainty regimes. Crucially, DCP's modular design facilitates plug-and-play experimentation with different predictor-score pairings, quantitatively supported by a newly introduced modified Winkler score that balances validity and efficiency by explicitly penalizing undercoverage. While DCP generalizes and extends existing approaches like Conformalized Quantile Regression and Conformalized Monte Carlo, its modular design allows further extensions, setting a foundation for advancing uncertainty quantification in dynamic environments and high-risk applications.
Daniel Schweizer, Peter Kuhn, Jayant Sharma +3
May 26, 2026cs.LG

FM-fMRI: Event Conditioned Flow Matching for Rest-to-Task fMRI Time-Series Synthesis

Task-based fMRI provides a direct readout of task-evoked neural dynamics, but it is expensive and difficult to acquire at scale, motivating rest-to-task synthesis from widely available resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI). We propose FM-fMRI, an event-conditioned flow-matching model that learns a continuous-time conditional vector field to generate task ROI time series from a subject's rsfMRI and the task event information. The formulation enables fast ODE-based sampling and flexible conditioning over heterogeneous event schedules. Rather than optimizing for pointwise reconstruction, we evaluated generated signals using complementary criteria that probe temporal and spectral structure, subject and group-level connectome consistency, and distributional alignment. On the public Human Connectome Project and internal BioPoint autism cohort, FM-fMRI achieves the strongest spectral and connectivity agreement and improved distribution-level matching over conditional diffusion, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and variational autoencoders (VAEs) baselines. Furthermore, we augment the BioPoint cohort by synthesizing task-fMRI ROI time series with our method, improving downstream autism classification and demonstrating practical utility in data-limited clinical settings. The code will be available on GitHub.
Peiyu Duan, Jiyao Wang, Nicha C. Dvornek +4
May 24, 2026cs.LG

AME-TS: Anchored Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting models are increasingly scaled through large Transformer backbones, yet most existing approaches process all series through a shared dense computation path despite substantial heterogeneity in temporal structure. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) offers a natural alternative by enabling conditional computation, but standard MoE routing leaves expert specialization weakly identified and often unstable during downstream adaptation. We propose AME-TS, a structure-guided sparse time series foundation model that aligns expert routing with interpretable temporal structure. AME-TS first uses a lightweight regime predictor to estimate series-level descriptors, including forecastability, seasonality, trend, and sparsity, and maps them to a soft structural prior over experts. This series-level prior guides token-level routing during training, encouraging structure-aligned specialization. On the GIFT-Eval benchmark, AME-TS delivers a strong accuracy-efficiency tradeoff across model scales: it substantially outperforms existing time series foundation models at small model scales and remains competitive with the strongest models at larger scales, while activating substantially fewer parameters through sparse routing. We further show that AME-TS learns more interpretable routing geometry and substantially more stable expert specialization than standard MoE during fine-tuning on the M5 dataset. These results suggest that structure-aware routing is an effective and reliable way to realize the benefits of sparse expert models for time series forecasting.
Rui Wang, Renhao Xue, Ray Razi +2
May 24, 2026cs.LG

TSFMAudit: Data Contamination Auditing in Forecasting Time Series Foundation Models

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly pretrained on large corpora, raising concerns that evaluation datasets may have been exposed during pretraining and thus yield overly optimistic performance estimates. Auditing such contamination is challenging in time series because signals are continuous and heterogeneous, and often lack corpus documentation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study pretraining contamination auditing for TSFMs. We formalize the problem of pretraining contamination auditing for TSFMs and propose TSFMAudit, a method based on probe adaptation dynamics. Our key intuition is that contamination manifests as unusually efficient adaptation: after a fine tuning probe, contaminated datasets tend to exhibit faster loss reduction with smaller backbone movement. We evaluate TSFMAudit on 6 TSFMs and 187 datasets using documented training source evidence as supervision, and compare against 10 competitive baselines adapted from the LLM literature.
Hongkai Li, Shifeng Xie, Lefei Shen +7
May 23, 2026cs.CL

TS-Skill: A Benchmark for Evaluating Analytical Skills in Time-Series Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) and time-series language models (TSLMs) are increasingly applied to time-series question answering (TSQA). Unlike text-only QA, TSQA requires models to ground answers in temporal signals whose patterns may occur at different scales, specific time locations, or across separated intervals. However, existing benchmarks are typically organized by task types or high-level reasoning categories, making it difficult to diagnose the underlying signal-level capabilities driving model performance. We introduce TS-Skill, a controlled benchmark for evaluating three composable analytical skills in TSQA: temporal scale selection (SK1), temporal localization (SK2), and cross-interval integration (SK3). TS-Skill provides timestamp-aware questions, broad domain coverage, and human-validated QA quality. To construct the benchmark at scale, we develop SKEvol, a skill-guided agentic framework that combines domain-aware time-series seed generation, skill-controlled question generation, metadata- and code-assisted answer construction, multi-phase signal-grounded verification, and human-in-the-loop curation. Experiments on ten state-of-the-art LLMs and TSLMs reveal substantial and uneven capability gaps across SK1-SK3. In particular, SK3 remains consistently challenging for non-agent models, whereas tool-augmented agents show a selective advantage on standalone SK3. These findings demonstrate that skill-level evaluation can uncover temporal reasoning failures that are obscured by aggregate TSQA scores.
Liying Han, Kang Yang, Oliver Wang +9
May 22, 2026cs.LG

Valid and Expressive Copulas for Irregular Multivariate Time Series

We introduce CopFITi, a copula model for probabilistic forecasting of irregular multivariate time series (IMTS). Our model combines the expressivity of normalizing flows for univariate marginals with the consistency and flexibility of a Gaussian Mixture Copula for the joint dependency structure. Our experiments show that copula-based approaches, which decouple the marginals from the joint, yield better marginal models than architectures that directly fit the full joint. With CopFITi, we propose the first IMTS copula that is marginalization-consistent by construction and establish a new state of the art in joint IMTS density modeling.
Christian Klötergens, Tom Hanika, Lars Schmidt-Thieme +1
May 22, 2026cs.LG

Parametric Prior Mapping Framework for Non-stationary Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Effectively modeling non-stationary dynamics in probabilistic multivariate time series(MTS) forecasting requires balancing expressiveness with robustness. Existing parametric approaches benefit from strong inductive biases but lack flexibility, whereas deep generative models struggle to capture complex temporal dependencies without extensive data and computation. We introduce Parametric Prior Mapping (PPM), a framework that injects parametric structural priors into a generative modeling process. Specifically, PPM utilizes a parametric estimator to derive a dynamic, adaptive prior that guides the learning of a complex predictive distribution via a learnable mapping. This design allows the model to retain the efficiency of parametric methods while exploiting the expressive power of generative models. Trained with a hybrid objective, PPM yields precise forecasts with well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Empirical results show that PPM outperforms existing baselines in handling non-stationary data, offering a superior trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/ljl8336/PPM.
Jinglin Li, Jun Tan, QI Fang +1
May 22, 2026cs.LG

Continuity and Ordinality Matter: Constraining Time Series Tokens for Effective Time Series Analysis with Large Language Models

Token-based time series large language models (TS-LLMs) have emerged as a promising direction for time series analysis and reasoning. However, prior studies largely overlook the inherent continuity and ordinality of time series tokens, which substantially limits model performance. In this paper, we argue that preserving these properties in time series token embeddings is crucial for the effectiveness of token-based TS-LLMs. To this end, we propose COM (Continuity and Ordinality Matter), a continuity- and ordinality-aware strategy that integrates geometric constraints into both the initialization and training stages. Empirical results on multiple time series analysis benchmarks demonstrate that COM consistently improves the performance of token-based TS-LLMs, achieving competitive results and strong generalizability. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/COM .
Musheng Li, Ziying Zhang, Cheng jin +1
May 22, 2026cs.LG

PaP-NF: Probabilistic Long-Term Time Series Forecasting via Prefix-as-Prompt Reprogramming and Normalizing Flows

Time series forecasting plays a central role in many real-world applications and has been extensively studied. Most existing approaches rely on deterministic models. However, real-world environments exhibit inherently uncertain and complex future behaviors, making single-point predictions insufficient. This highlights the need for probabilistic forecasting methods that can quantify and represent uncertainty. In this work, we propose PaP-NF, a probabilistic forecasting framework that aligns continuous time series representations with a frozen large language model (LLM) using a Prefix-as-Prompt mechanism, and conditions a normalizing flow decoder on the global context extracted by the LLM. The quality of the resulting predictive distributions is evaluated using the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), a standard metric in probabilistic forecasting. Across a variety of long-term forecasting benchmarks, PaP-NF robustly captures multi-modal uncertainty while maintaining competitive point forecasting accuracy. The official implementation is available at: https://github.com/democracy04/PaP-NF
Minju Kim, Youngbum Hur
May 21, 2026cs.LG

World Machine: Towards Generative World Modeling for Time-Series

World models represent a paradigm shift in generative AI, pursuing predictive understanding and controllable simulation of environments in a structured and generalizable way. We present World Machine, a generative world-modeling architecture for time series. It is a transformer-based architecture with latent states that enables adaptation to different amounts of observed data and contexts. This shows an improvement over traditional transformers, which have a computational and memory cost that scales quadratically with the context. Experiments on a proposed synthetic dataset, Toy1D, validate the approach's feasibility, demonstrate capabilities not found in conventional transformers, and highlight the contributions of each component of the training protocol.
Elton Cardoso do Nascimento, Alexandre da Silva Simões, Esther Luna Colombini +2
May 21, 2026cs.LG

ChronoVAE-HOPE: Beyond Attention -- A Next-Generation VAE Foundation Model for Specialized Time Series Classification

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have become a new component of the state-of-the-art in general time series forecasting. However, adapting them to specialized classification tasks remains constrained by two interconnected challenges: the quadratic cost of standard attention mechanisms and the inability to disentangle the structural components underlying time series variability. This technical report introduces ChronoVAE-HOPE, a next-generation TSFM that reconciles massive generalization with structured latent representation for time series classification. The core of the proposal is a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework built upon the HOPE Block, which replaces quadratic attention with a dual-memory system: Titans modules for dynamic short-term retention and a Continuum Memory System (CMS) for the abstraction of long-term historical context. A key architectural novelty is the disentangled latent space, which factorizes representations into independent trend and seasonal components via dedicated encoder heads and separate decoder pathways. ChronoVAE-HOPE undergoes self-supervised pre-training on the Monash archive, combining a Masked Time Series Modeling (MTSM) auxiliary objective with a disentangled VAE reconstruction loss. The pre-trained encoder is subsequently frozen and used to generate fixed-length embeddings for downstream classification on the UCR benchmark datasets. Empirical results demonstrate strong performance across diverse temporal domains, particularly in settings characterized by strict causal structure. ChronoVAE-HOPE establishes a robust and interpretable framework for the adaptation of foundation models to time series classification through structured generative representations.
José Alberto Rodríguez, Luis Balderas, Miguel Lastra +2
May 21, 2026cs.LG

Prototype-Guided Classification Sub-Task Decoupling Framework: Enhancing Generalization and Interpretability for Multivariate Time Series

Time Series Classification (TSC) is a long-standing research problem that has gained increasing attention in recent years with the rapid growth of large-scale temporal data. Despite substantial progress enabled by deep learning, designing TSC models that are both accurate and interpretable remains a challenging task. Many existing approaches adopt a direct feature-to-label classification paradigm, by collapsing high-dimensional temporal embeddings into class logits via a single linear projection (often after global pooling), the paradigm conflates feature extraction and decision logic into an inseparable mapping. To address these limitations, we propose PDFTime, a prototype-guided framework that reformulates time series classification as a multi-stage decision process. Instead of direct feature-to-label mapping, PDFTime leverages learned prototypes to approximate class-conditional feature distributions in the latent space, enabling progressive discrimination through classification sub-tasks of varying granularity. To our knowledge, PDFTime is the first framework to reformulate time series classification as a decoupled, multi-stage similarity-based reasoning process, breaking the long-standing paradigm of direct, black-box feature-to-label mapping. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that PDFTime achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across UEA and UCR benchmarks. Notably, it secures the top-11 accuracy on 80 out of 128 datasets in the UCR archive, significantly outperforming recent strong baselines in both consistency and generalization.
Xianhao Song, Yuang Zhang, Yuqi She +2
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Divide and Contrast: Learning Robust Temporal Features without Augmentation

Self-supervised learning for time-series representation aims to reduce reliance on labeled data while maintaining strong downstream performance, yet many existing approaches incur high computational costs or rely on assumptions that do not hold across diverse temporal dynamics. In this work, we introduce Divide and Contrast (Di-COT), an unsupervised framework that avoids data augmentation and multiple encoder passes by contrasting informative substructures within a window rather than individual timesteps. Di-COT stochastically partitions each window into a small number of overlapping sub-blocks per iteration, enabling efficient and meaningful contrast while mitigating false positives during temporal transitions. To further improve scalability, we adopt a contrastive objective whose computation depends on the batch size and the number of sub-blocks, making loss computation independent of sequence length. Extensive experiments on six large-scale real-world datasets, as well as the UCR and UEA benchmarks, demonstrate that Di-COT learns semantically structured and transferable representations, achieving state-of-the-art performance on classification, clustering, kkNN, and cross-dataset transfer, while substantially reducing training time. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/sfi-norwai/Di-COT.
Abdul-Kazeem Shamba, Kerstin Bach, Gavin Taylor
May 20, 2026cs.SI

SURGE: An Event-Centric Social Media Sentiment Time Series Benchmark with Interaction Structure

Public events on social media generate large volumes of discussion whose collective dynamics carry direct value for opinion forecasting and crisis response. Capturing how these dynamics evolve across an event's lifecycle requires organizing fragmented posts into event-level time series. Existing datasets cover only a small number of events within a single category, and typically discard the interaction structure between posts when constructing time series, which restricts both transfer across event types and controlled study of how interactions shape the resulting collective dynamics. We present SURGE, a multi-event social media benchmark that pairs event-level time series with aligned text and interaction structure linking posts within an event. SURGE is built through an automated pipeline that produces calendar-aligned time series at three temporal granularities, covering 67 events and more than 800K posts across five event categories. Each time bin is paired with flat and structured textual views derived from the same selected posts, enabling controlled evaluation of whether social interaction structure affects forecasting behavior. On top of SURGE we define benchmark protocols for numerical-only forecasting, text-augmented forecasting, high-interaction evaluation, and leave-one-category-out generalization. Experiments with representative time-series and multimodal forecasting models reveal three properties of the benchmark: a strong local-persistence regime in which naive baselines remain hard to beat under absolute error, limited transfer of existing text-augmented forecasters to event-driven social-media data, and increased difficulty on reply-dense periods that aggregate metrics tend to obscure. We further include a lightweight structure-aware probe as a reference implementation, illustrating how SURGE can support interaction-aware forecasting research.
Chen Su, Pengsen Cheng, Yuanhe Tian +1
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Reviving Error Correction in Modern Deep Time-Series Forecasting

Modern deep-learning models have achieved remarkable success in time-series forecasting. Yet, their performance degrades in long-term prediction due to error accumulation in autoregressive inference, where predictions are recursively used as inputs. While classical error correction mechanisms (ECMs) have long been used in statistical methods, their applicability to deep learning models remains limited or ineffective. In this work, we revisit the error accumulation problem in deep time-series forecasting and investigate the role and necessity of ECMs in this new context. We propose a simple, architecture-agnostic error correction model that can be integrated with any existing forecaster without requiring retraining. By explicitly decomposing predictions into trend and seasonal components and training the corrector to adjust each separately, we introduce the Universal Error Corrector with Seasonal-Trend Decomposition (UEC-STD), which significantly improves correction accuracy and robustness across 4 backbones and 10 datasets. Our findings provide a practical tool for enhancing forecasts while offering new insights into mitigating autoregressive errors in deep time-series models. Code is available at https://github.com/DA2I2-SLM/UEC-STD.
Minh Hoang Nguyen, Dai Do, Huu Hiep Nguyen +3
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Discovering Entity-Conditioned Lag Heterogeneity: A Lag-Gated Neural Audit Framework for Panel Time Series

Country-level temporal panels are widely used in empirical analysis. Researchers often need to audit how different entities respond to historical signals over different time horizons. Current approaches typically do not provide directly auditable entity-specific lag summaries. We formulate entity-conditioned heterogeneous lag discovery as a temporal panel mining task and propose AC-GATE, an Adaptive-Conditioning Encoder with a Scale-Invariant Lag Gate. It instantiates conditional Moderated Distributed Lag by using observable entity-level proxies to condition lag-weight distributions over historical observations, thereby making effective lags structural outputs of the model rather than post-hoc explanations. The evaluation is based on a layered audit protocol that separates predictive calibration from lag discovery. A synthetic panel with known ground-truth lags is used for mechanism recovery testing, and two real-world country-level panels are used for external audit and stress testing. The results show that AC-GATE can recover heterogeneous lag structure in synthetic data, and generates non-degenerate, externally structured effective lags in real data.
Andi Xu
May 19, 2026cs.LG

LLM Pretraining Shapes a Generalizable Manifold: Insights into Cross-Modal Transfer to Time Series

Can language-pretrained transformers become effective time-series forecasters, and why? In this paper, we show that cross-modal transfer arises because language pretraining preconditions time series training with a reusable manifold. A linear probe on frozen LLM states decodes realistic time-series trajectories without paired supervision, and retrieval in this projected space yields competitive forecasts, showing that structure and dynamics exist before finetuning. Pretrained initialization also improves optimization, producing coherent gradients and a highly anisotropic loss landscape unlike random initialization. Finetuning then acts as low-dimensional alignment, reusing existing directions rather than learning temporal primitives from scratch, as evidenced by low-rank updates, subspace alignment, and shared features for periodicity, trend, and repetition. Together, these results support a geometric account of LLM-to-time-series transfer: language pretraining builds the manifold, and finetuning projects numerical dynamics onto task-relevant directions.
Alexis Roger, Prateek Humane, Zhenghan Tai +4
May 19, 2026cs.LG

Toto 2.0: Time Series Forecasting Enters the Scaling Era

We show that time series foundation models scale: a single training recipe produces reliable forecast-quality improvements from 4M to 2.5B parameters. We release Toto 2.0, a family of five open-weights forecasting models trained under this recipe. The Toto 2.0 family sets a new state of the art on three forecasting benchmarks: BOOM, our observability benchmark; GIFT-Eval, the standard general-purpose benchmark; and the recent contamination-resistant TIME benchmark. This report describes our experimental results and details the design decisions behind Toto 2.0: its architecture and training recipe, training data, and the u-muP hyperparameter transfer pipeline. All five base checkpoints are released under Apache 2.0.
Emaad Khwaja, Chris Lettieri, Gerald Woo +10
May 19, 2026cs.LG

Latent Laplace Diffusion for Irregular Multivariate Time Series

Irregular multivariate time series impose a trade-off for long-horizon forecasting: discrete methods can distort temporal structure via re-gridding, while continuous-time models often require sequential solvers prone to drift. To bridge this gap, we present Latent Laplace Diffusion (LLapDiff), a generative framework that models the target as a low-dimensional latent trajectory, enabling horizon-wide generation without step-by-step integration over physical time. We guide the reverse process utilizing a stable modal parameterization motivated by stochastic port-Hamiltonian dynamics, and parameterize its mean evolution in the Laplace domain via learnable complex-conjugate poles, enabling direct evaluation over irregular timestamps. We also link continuous dynamics to irregular observations through renewal-averaging analysis, which maps sampling gaps to effective event-domain poles and motivates a gap-aware history summarizer. Extensive experiments show that LLapDiff improves over baselines in long-horizon forecasting, and its continuous-time generative nature supports missing-value imputation by querying the same model at historical timestamps. Code is available at https://github.com/pixelhero98/LLapDiffusion.
Zinuo You, Jin Zheng, John Cartlidge
May 19, 2026cs.LG

Quantifying the Pre-training Dividend: Generative versus Latent Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Foundation Models

The success of self-supervised learning (SSL) in vision and NLP has motivated its rapid adoption for time series. However, research has focused primarily on Generative paradigms and forecasting tasks, leaving the broader utility of learned representations unquantified. We establish a controlled framework to evaluate the "pre-training dividend": the value added by SSL across diverse temporal tasks. We systematically compare Generative paradigms against Latent Alignment architectures, introducing adaptations of LeJEPA and DINO for time series. These adaptations utilize Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) augmentations to enforce invariance to local fluctuations. Our analysis reveals that the pre-training dividend is highly asymmetric: SSL yields gains of up to 375% for anomaly detection and classification, yet remains marginal for forecasting. We demonstrate that representational utility is non-universal, governed by a precision-invariance trade-off where the specific signal resolution required by the task must align with the objective. Finally, we show that representation quality is largely independent of data origin and saturates at moderate architectural depths, suggesting a path to scaling via massive synthetic generation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/noammajor/Models
Noam Major, Kathy Razmadze, Yoli Shavit
May 18, 2026cs.LG

Chronicle: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Joint Language and Time Series Understanding

Real-world time series come with text: metadata, descriptions, news, reports. Yet time series foundation models process numerical sequences in isolation, and the multimodal text-and-time-series models that attempt to bridge the two all adapt a pretrained language model post hoc, inheriting representations shaped without ever seeing temporal data. These models are also evaluated almost exclusively against other multimodal baselines, not against the strongest unimodal foundation models in either domain, leaving open whether joint training is needed at all. We present Chronicle, a compact 324M-parameter decoder-only transformer trained from scratch on natural language and time series within a single unified architecture. Both modalities share the same transformer blocks, attention mechanism, and residual stream; the bulk of pretraining uses unimodal batches so cross-modal capability emerges purely from shared parameters, with a short alignment stage that interleaves the two. To our knowledge, Chronicle is the first model jointly pretrained on text and time series from scratch, and the first multimodal model evaluated against dedicated foundation models in both domains. It matches Gemma-3-270M-PT on 19 NLU tasks, sets a new bar for frozen-embedding time series classification on 24 UCR/UEA datasets, and produces multimodal forecasts on Time-MMD that beat every supervised fusion baseline, all from a single backbone.
Paul Quinlan, Jeremy Levasseur, Qingguo Li +1
May 18, 2026cs.LG

KairosHope: A Next-Generation Time-Series Foundation Model for Specialized Classification via Dual-Memory Architecture

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have demonstrated notable success in general-purpose forecasting tasks; however, their adaptation to specialized classification problems remains constrained by the computational bottleneck of standard attention and the systematic omission of classical statistical knowledge. This technical report introduces KairosHope, a next-generation TSFM designed to reconcile massive generalization with analytical precision in classification tasks. The core of the proposal is the HOPE block, an architecture that replaces quadratic attention with a dual-memory system: Titans modules for dynamic short-term retention and a Continuum Memory System (CMS) for the abstraction of long-term historical context. To enrich the inductive bias, a Hybrid Decision Head is introduced, which fuses deep latent representations with deterministic statistical features extracted via tsfeatures package. KairosHope undergoes self-supervised pre-training on the massive Monash archive, combining Masked Time Series Modeling (MTSM) and contrastive learning (InfoNCE). Its subsequent adaptation to the UCR benchmark datasets is conducted through a rigorous Linear Probing and Full Fine-Tuning (LP-FT) protocol to prevent catastrophic forgetting. Empirical results demonstrate superior performance in domains characterized by strict temporal causality such as HAR or Sensor data. Consequently, KairosHope establishes a robust and efficient framework for the adaptation of foundation models to time series analysis.
Luis Balderas, José Alberto Rodríguez, Miguel Lastra +2