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Jul 20

Probabilistic AutoRegressive Neural Networks for Accurate Long-range Forecasting

Forecasting time series data is a critical area of research with applications spanning from stock prices to early epidemic prediction. While numerous statistical and machine learning methods have been proposed, real-life prediction problems often require hybrid solutions that bridge classical forecasting approaches and modern neural network models. In this study, we introduce the Probabilistic AutoRegressive Neural Networks (PARNN), capable of handling complex time series data exhibiting non-stationarity, nonlinearity, non-seasonality, long-range dependence, and chaotic patterns. PARNN is constructed by improving autoregressive neural networks (ARNN) using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) feedback error, combining the explainability, scalability, and "white-box-like" prediction behavior of both models. Notably, the PARNN model provides uncertainty quantification through prediction intervals, setting it apart from advanced deep learning tools. Through comprehensive computational experiments, we evaluate the performance of PARNN against standard statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models, including Transformers, NBeats, and DeepAR. Diverse real-world datasets from macroeconomics, tourism, epidemiology, and other domains are employed for short-term, medium-term, and long-term forecasting evaluations. Our results demonstrate the superiority of PARNN across various forecast horizons, surpassing the state-of-the-art forecasters. The proposed PARNN model offers a valuable hybrid solution for accurate long-range forecasting. By effectively capturing the complexities present in time series data, it outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and reliability. The ability to quantify uncertainty through prediction intervals further enhances the model's usefulness in decision-making processes.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 1, 2022

Graph-based Multi-ODE Neural Networks for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Forecasting

There is a recent surge in the development of spatio-temporal forecasting models in the transportation domain. Long-range traffic forecasting, however, remains a challenging task due to the intricate and extensive spatio-temporal correlations observed in traffic networks. Current works primarily rely on road networks with graph structures and learn representations using graph neural networks (GNNs), but this approach suffers from over-smoothing problem in deep architectures. To tackle this problem, recent methods introduced the combination of GNNs with residual connections or neural ordinary differential equations (ODE). However, current graph ODE models face two key limitations in feature extraction: (1) they lean towards global temporal patterns, overlooking local patterns that are important for unexpected events; and (2) they lack dynamic semantic edges in their architectural design. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Graph-based Multi-ODE Neural Networks (GRAM-ODE) which is designed with multiple connective ODE-GNN modules to learn better representations by capturing different views of complex local and global dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies. We also add some techniques like shared weights and divergence constraints into the intermediate layers of distinct ODE-GNN modules to further improve their communication towards the forecasting task. Our extensive set of experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of GRAM-ODE compared with state-of-the-art baselines as well as the contribution of different components to the overall performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zbliu98/GRAM-ODE

  • 3 authors
·
May 29, 2023

PGN: The RNN's New Successor is Effective for Long-Range Time Series Forecasting

Due to the recurrent structure of RNN, the long information propagation path poses limitations in capturing long-term dependencies, gradient explosion/vanishing issues, and inefficient sequential execution. Based on this, we propose a novel paradigm called Parallel Gated Network (PGN) as the new successor to RNN. PGN directly captures information from previous time steps through the designed Historical Information Extraction (HIE) layer and leverages gated mechanisms to select and fuse it with the current time step information. This reduces the information propagation path to O(1), effectively addressing the limitations of RNN. To enhance PGN's performance in long-range time series forecasting tasks, we propose a novel temporal modeling framework called Temporal PGN (TPGN). TPGN incorporates two branches to comprehensively capture the semantic information of time series. One branch utilizes PGN to capture long-term periodic patterns while preserving their local characteristics. The other branch employs patches to capture short-term information and aggregate the global representation of the series. TPGN achieves a theoretical complexity of O(L), ensuring efficiency in its operations. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and high efficiency of TPGN, further confirming the effectiveness of PGN as the new successor to RNN in long-range time series forecasting. The code is available in this repository: https://github.com/Water2sea/TPGN.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

Long-term Wind Power Forecasting with Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Transformer

Wind power is attracting increasing attention around the world due to its renewable, pollution-free, and other advantages. However, safely and stably integrating the high permeability intermittent power energy into electric power systems remains challenging. Accurate wind power forecasting (WPF) can effectively reduce power fluctuations in power system operations. Existing methods are mainly designed for short-term predictions and lack effective spatial-temporal feature augmentation. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end wind power forecasting model named Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network (HSTTN) to address the long-term WPF problems. Specifically, we construct an hourglass-shaped encoder-decoder framework with skip-connections to jointly model representations aggregated in hierarchical temporal scales, which benefits long-term forecasting. Based on this framework, we capture the inter-scale long-range temporal dependencies and global spatial correlations with two parallel Transformer skeletons and strengthen the intra-scale connections with downsampling and upsampling operations. Moreover, the complementary information from spatial and temporal features is fused and propagated in each other via Contextual Fusion Blocks (CFBs) to promote the prediction further. Extensive experimental results on two large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our HSTTN over existing solutions.

  • 6 authors
·
May 30, 2023

Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting

Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, including quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a ProbSparse self-attention mechanism, which achieves O(L log L) in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences' dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 14, 2020

Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting

Extending the forecasting time is a critical demand for real applications, such as extreme weather early warning and long-term energy consumption planning. This paper studies the long-term forecasting problem of time series. Prior Transformer-based models adopt various self-attention mechanisms to discover the long-range dependencies. However, intricate temporal patterns of the long-term future prohibit the model from finding reliable dependencies. Also, Transformers have to adopt the sparse versions of point-wise self-attentions for long series efficiency, resulting in the information utilization bottleneck. Going beyond Transformers, we design Autoformer as a novel decomposition architecture with an Auto-Correlation mechanism. We break with the pre-processing convention of series decomposition and renovate it as a basic inner block of deep models. This design empowers Autoformer with progressive decomposition capacities for complex time series. Further, inspired by the stochastic process theory, we design the Auto-Correlation mechanism based on the series periodicity, which conducts the dependencies discovery and representation aggregation at the sub-series level. Auto-Correlation outperforms self-attention in both efficiency and accuracy. In long-term forecasting, Autoformer yields state-of-the-art accuracy, with a 38% relative improvement on six benchmarks, covering five practical applications: energy, traffic, economics, weather and disease. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Autoformer.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 24, 2021

FRWKV+: Periodic-Aware Adaptive Gating for Frequency-Space Linear Time Series Forecasting

Accurate and efficient long-term multivariate time series forecasting requires capturing recurring temporal structure while keeping inference cheap across many variables and horizons. Frequency-space models represent long-range and periodic variation compactly, but they typically process the real and imaginary spectral components as weakly coupled streams and treat periodic cues as ordinary input features, even when such cues are unreliable. This paper proposes FRWKV-Plus, a lightweight periodic-aware frequency-space forecasting model built on the efficient FRWKV backbone. FRWKV-Plus introduces a cross-branch spectral gate that reweights each spectral branch using a summary of its sibling branch, and a trust-gated residual correction that converts compact within-period context into a bounded, sign-flexible adjustment of these gates under a learned, data-dependent trust score. By construction, the correction is identity-preserving at initialization and strictly bounded, so periodic evidence can refine but never dominate or invert the base interaction. On seven standard benchmarks, FRWKV-Plus is consistently competitive with strong linear, frequency-domain, recurrent-style, and Transformer-based forecasters while preserving the lightweight profile of the backbone. Controlled three-seed ablations show that each component contributes, that the benefit is modest on strongly periodic data and pronounced on the harder Exchange and ILI datasets, and that the within-period context is the most influential single component. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/yangqingyuan-byte/FRWKV-plus.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 6

Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Traffic forecasting has emerged as a core component of intelligent transportation systems. However, timely accurate traffic forecasting, especially long-term forecasting, still remains an open challenge due to the highly nonlinear and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies of traffic flows. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm of Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks (STTNs) that leverages dynamical directed spatial dependencies and long-range temporal dependencies to improve the accuracy of long-term traffic forecasting. Specifically, we present a new variant of graph neural networks, named spatial transformer, by dynamically modeling directed spatial dependencies with self-attention mechanism to capture realtime traffic conditions as well as the directionality of traffic flows. Furthermore, different spatial dependency patterns can be jointly modeled with multi-heads attention mechanism to consider diverse relationships related to different factors (e.g. similarity, connectivity and covariance). On the other hand, the temporal transformer is utilized to model long-range bidirectional temporal dependencies across multiple time steps. Finally, they are composed as a block to jointly model the spatial-temporal dependencies for accurate traffic prediction. Compared to existing works, the proposed model enables fast and scalable training over a long range spatial-temporal dependencies. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the state-of-the-arts, especially forecasting long-term traffic flows on real-world PeMS-Bay and PeMSD7(M) datasets.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 9, 2020 1

SpikF-GO: Spiking Fourier Graph Operators for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks, demonstrating strong performance in computer vision and robotics. More recently, SNNs have been applied to time series forecasting (TSF), with methods exploring spiking temporal backbones, spike-compatible positional encodings, Fourier-domain processing, and redesigned neuron dynamics. However, existing SNN forecasting approaches process variables independently, lacking explicit mechanisms for modeling inter-variable dependencies. This is a critical limitation in multivariate settings, where cross-variable correlations carry substantial predictive information. We propose Spiking Fourier Graph Operators (SpikF-GO), which addresses this gap by combining a hypervariate graph formulation in which every scalar observation becomes a graph node with spike-driven spectral processing. SpikF-GO introduces a Hard Concrete frequency gate for learnable sparse frequency selection and a Complex LIF gate that applies independent spiking neurons to real and imaginary Fourier components, preserving binary, event-driven computation throughout the spectral domain. We further present a variant incorporating Central Pattern Generator-based positional encodings for stronger long-range temporal modeling. Evaluated on eight benchmarks under a unified experimental protocol, SpikF-GO achieves the best average rank among all SNN methods and outperforms its ANN counterpart, FourierGNN, at reduced energy cost. SpikF-GO maintains competitive accuracy even at substantially smaller embedding dimensions, thereby achieving significant energy reductions. To our knowledge, this is among the first works to bring graph-based multivariate modeling into the spiking domain for TSF and the first to provide a unified comparison across SNN forecasting architectures under a common experimental protocol.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 10

T3Time: Tri-Modal Time Series Forecasting via Adaptive Multi-Head Alignment and Residual Fusion

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) seeks to model temporal dynamics among variables to predict future trends. Transformer-based models and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and patterns. However, current methods often rely on rigid inductive biases, ignore intervariable interactions, or apply static fusion strategies that limit adaptability across forecast horizons. These limitations create bottlenecks in capturing nuanced, horizon-specific relationships in time-series data. To solve this problem, we propose T3Time, a novel trimodal framework consisting of time, spectral, and prompt branches, where the dedicated frequency encoding branch captures the periodic structures along with a gating mechanism that learns prioritization between temporal and spectral features based on the prediction horizon. We also proposed a mechanism which adaptively aggregates multiple cross-modal alignment heads by dynamically weighting the importance of each head based on the features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average reduction of 3.28% in MSE and 2.29% in MAE. Furthermore, it shows strong generalization in few-shot learning settings: with 5% training data, we see a reduction in MSE and MAE by 4.13% and 1.91%, respectively; and with 10% data, by 3.62% and 1.98% on average. Code - https://github.com/monaf-chowdhury/T3Time/

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025

D-CTNet: A Dual-Branch Channel-Temporal Forecasting Network with Frequency-Domain Correction

Accurate Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting is crucial for collaborative design of complex systems, Digital Twin building, and maintenance ahead of time. However, the collaborative industrial environment presents new challenges for MTS forecasting models: models should decouple complex inter-variable dependencies while addressing non-stationary distribution shift brought by environmental changes. To address these challenges and improve collaborative sensing reliability, we propose a Patch-Based Dual-Branch Channel-Temporal Forecasting Network (D-CTNet). Particularly, with a parallel dual-branch design incorporating linear temporal modeling layer and channel attention mechanism, our method explicitly decouples and jointly learns intra-channel temporal evolution patterns and dynamic multivariate correlations. Furthermore, a global patch attention fusion module goes beyond the local window scope to model long range dependencies. Most importantly, aiming at non-stationarity, a Frequency-Domain Stationarity Correction mechanism adaptively suppresses distribution shift impacts from environment change by spectrum alignment. Evaluations on seven benchmark datasets show that our model achieves better forecasting accuracy and robustness compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our work shows great promise as a new forecasting engine for industrial collaborative systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 30, 2025

SAGA: A Sequence-Adaptive Generative Architecture for Multi-Horizon Probabilistic Forecasting with Adaptive Temporal Conformal Prediction

Microsimulation models used by ministries of finance and central banks rely on parametric processes for lifetime earnings that capture only first and second moments of the conditional distribution and miss long-range nonlinear structure. We propose SAGA, a decoder-only transformer for irregular tabular panel sequences, paired with a split conformal calibration wrapper that delivers individual-level prediction intervals with finite-sample marginal coverage guarantees. Trained on the longitudinal Swedish LISA register over 1990 to 2022, comprising 2,143,817 individuals and 61,284,903 person-years, the model forecasts annual labor earnings at horizons of one to thirty years and aggregates them by Monte Carlo into present-discounted lifetime earnings distributions. Against the canonical Guvenen, Karahan, Ozkan, and Song parametric process and tabular and recurrent baselines, SAGA reduces continuous ranked probability score by 31.9 percent at the ten-year horizon and mean absolute error by 37.7 percent at the twenty-year horizon. Conformal intervals achieve nominal coverage to within 0.4 percentage points marginally and within 2.4 percentage points on the worst-case demographic subgroup. The reconstructed lifetime earnings Gini coefficient is 0.327 against the partially observed truth of 0.341 and the GKOS estimate of 0.378. Model weights, calibration tables, and a synthetic equivalent dataset are released for replication outside the protected SCB MONA environment.

  • 2 authors
·
May 17 1

From shape to fate: making bacterial swarming expansion predictable

Microbial swarming on mucosal surfaces reshapes microbial communities and influences mucosal healing and antibiotic tolerance. Yet even with time-lapse microscopy and deep learning, analyses of swarming colonies remain descriptive and cannot forecast how their fronts reorganize in time. This limitation is significant because the advancing edge determines access to nutrients, host tissue and competing microbes. We recast the expansion of Enterobacter sp. SM3 swarms as a problem of morphological forecasting, and assemble SwarmEvo, a time-lapse dataset represented as boundary-resolved segmentations. TexPol--Net, a texture- and geometry-aware segmentation model, sharpens diffuse edges and preserves fingered fronts, creating a stable substrate for dynamics. On this representation, we develop Morpher, an autoregressive forecasting network with a ``Morphon'' memory that links local curvature to long-range temporal dependencies. Morpher outperforms leading video-prediction models in maintaining front localization and anisotropic branching, and modest segmentation improvements yield noticeably more stable forecasts. Ablations across sequence models, inference strategies and observation ratios show that attention-based architectures with structural memory best preserve dense-finger propagation. By uniting geometry-aware segmentation with morphology-level forecasting, this framework turns swarming expansion into a predictive dynamical system, enabling quantitative interrogation and potential control of microbial collectives during mucosal repair and gut ecosystem engineering.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 1

A Survey on Structured State Space Sequence (S4) Models

Recent advancements in sequence modeling have led to the emergence of Structured State Space Models (SSMs) as an efficient alternative to Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Transformers, addressing challenges in long-range dependency modeling and computational efficiency. While RNNs suffer from vanishing gradients and sequential inefficiencies, and Transformers face quadratic complexity, SSMs leverage structured recurrence and state-space representations to achieve superior long-sequence processing with linear or near-linear complexity. This survey provides a comprehensive review of SSMs, tracing their evolution from the foundational S4 model to its successors like Mamba, Simplified Structured State Space Sequence Model (S5), and Jamba, highlighting their improvements in computational efficiency, memory optimization, and inference speed. By comparing SSMs with traditional sequence models across domains such as natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, vision, and time-series forecasting, we demonstrate their advantages in handling long-range dependencies while reducing computational overhead. Despite their potential, challenges remain in areas such as training optimization, hybrid modeling, and interpretability. This survey serves as a structured guide for researchers and practitioners, detailing the advancements, trade-offs, and future directions of SSM-based architectures in AI and deep learning.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 21, 2025 1

FengWu-GHR: Learning the Kilometer-scale Medium-range Global Weather Forecasting

Kilometer-scale modeling of global atmosphere dynamics enables fine-grained weather forecasting and decreases the risk of disastrous weather and climate activity. Therefore, building a kilometer-scale global forecast model is a persistent pursuit in the meteorology domain. Active international efforts have been made in past decades to improve the spatial resolution of numerical weather models. Nonetheless, developing the higher resolution numerical model remains a long-standing challenge due to the substantial consumption of computational resources. Recent advances in data-driven global weather forecasting models utilize reanalysis data for model training and have demonstrated comparable or even higher forecasting skills than numerical models. However, they are all limited by the resolution of reanalysis data and incapable of generating higher-resolution forecasts. This work presents FengWu-GHR, the first data-driven global weather forecasting model running at the 0.09^{circ} horizontal resolution. FengWu-GHR introduces a novel approach that opens the door for operating ML-based high-resolution forecasts by inheriting prior knowledge from a pretrained low-resolution model. The hindcast of weather prediction in 2022 indicates that FengWu-GHR is superior to the IFS-HRES. Furthermore, evaluations on station observations and case studies of extreme events support the competitive operational forecasting skill of FengWu-GHR at the high resolution.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 28, 2024

MSMixer: Learned Multi-Scale Temporal Mixing with Complementary Linear Shortcut for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

Long-term time series forecasting requires models that simultaneously capture rapid oscillations, medium-range periodicities, and slowly evolving macro-trends from a fixed look-back window. Existing lightweight MLP-based models typically operate on a single temporal resolution, limiting their ability to explicitly model patterns at multiple scales. We propose MSMixer, a channel-independent multi-scale MLP architecture that addresses this limitation through three complementary innovations: (i) three parallel scale branches at down-sample factors {1x, 4x, 16x} with independent MLP blocks, (ii) a learnable softmax gate that dynamically weighs branch outputs, and (iii) a DLinear complementary shortcut that provides full-window trend and seasonality context. MSMixer contains only 112K parameters at H=96 and runs at O(T) complexity. Evaluated on four ETT benchmarks with standard chronological splits and three random seeds, MSMixer achieves the lowest average MSE (0.357) among lightweight models, outperforming DLinear (0.386, -7.4%) and NLinear (0.365, -2.1%), winning 12 of 16 configurations. Against five Transformer-based baselines from the literature, MSMixer achieves best or second-best MSE in 9 of 16 configurations while using 5x fewer parameters than PatchTST. Ablation and sensitivity analyses confirm the complementary contributions of the multi-scale branches and the DLinear shortcut.

  • 1 authors
·
May 14

Epileptic seizure forecasting with long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks

Objective: Forecasting epileptic seizures can reduce uncertainty for patients and allow preventative actions. While many models can predict the occurrence of seizures from features of the EEG, few models incorporate changes in features over time. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks are a machine learning architecture that can display temporal dynamics due to the recurrent connections. In this paper, we used LSTMs to monitor changes in EEG features over time to improve the accuracy of seizure forecasts and to alter the time window of the forecast. Methods: Long-term intracranial EEG recordings from eight patients from the NeuroVista dataset were used. A Fourier transform of 1-minute segments of EEG was fed into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The outputs from the CNN were input to three different LSTM models at different time intervals: 1 minute, 1 hour and 1 day. The LSTM model outputs were used to predict seizure onset within a time window. The prediction and start of the time window were separated by the same length of time as the window. Window sizes tested included 2, 4, 10, 20 and 40 minutes. Results and Conclusion: Our model forecast seizure onsets well above a random predictor. Compared to other models using the same dataset, our model performed better for some patients and worse for others. Monitoring the change in EEG features over time allowed our model to produce good results over a range of different window sizes, which is an improvement on previous models and raises the possibility of altering the forecast to meet individual patient needs. Furthermore, a window size of 40 minutes provides a potential intervention time of 40 minutes, which is the first time an intervention time of more than 5 minutes have been forecast using long-term EEG recordings.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 18, 2023

PA-CFL: Privacy-Adaptive Clustered Federated Learning for Transformer-Based Sales Forecasting on Heterogeneous Retail Data

Federated learning (FL) enables retailers to share model parameters for demand forecasting while maintaining privacy. However, heterogeneous data across diverse regions, driven by factors such as varying consumer behavior, poses challenges to the effectiveness of federated learning. To tackle this challenge, we propose Privacy-Adaptive Clustered Federated Learning (PA-CFL) tailored for demand forecasting on heterogeneous retail data. By leveraging differential privacy and feature importance distribution, PA-CFL groups retailers into distinct ``bubbles'', each forming its own federated learning system to effectively isolate data heterogeneity. Within each bubble, Transformer models are designed to predict local sales for each client. Our experiments demonstrate that PA-CFL significantly surpasses FedAvg and outperforms local learning in demand forecasting performance across all participating clients. Compared to local learning, PA-CFL achieves a 5.4% improvement in R^2, a 69% reduction in RMSE, and a 45% decrease in MAE. Our approach enables effective FL through adaptive adjustments to diverse noise levels and the range of clients participating in each bubble. By grouping participants and proactively filtering out high-risk clients, PA-CFL mitigates potential threats to the FL system. The findings demonstrate PA-CFL's ability to enhance federated learning in time series prediction tasks with heterogeneous data, achieving a balance between forecasting accuracy and privacy preservation in retail applications. Additionally, PA-CFL's capability to detect and neutralize poisoned data from clients enhances the system's robustness and reliability.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 15, 2025 1

Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks

Modeling multivariate time series has long been a subject that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including economics, finance, and traffic. A basic assumption behind multivariate time series forecasting is that its variables depend on one another but, upon looking closely, it is fair to say that existing methods fail to fully exploit latent spatial dependencies between pairs of variables. In recent years, meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high capability in handling relational dependencies. GNNs require well-defined graph structures for information propagation which means they cannot be applied directly for multivariate time series where the dependencies are not known in advance. In this paper, we propose a general graph neural network framework designed specifically for multivariate time series data. Our approach automatically extracts the uni-directed relations among variables through a graph learning module, into which external knowledge like variable attributes can be easily integrated. A novel mix-hop propagation layer and a dilated inception layer are further proposed to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies within the time series. The graph learning, graph convolution, and temporal convolution modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on 3 of 4 benchmark datasets and achieves on-par performance with other approaches on two traffic datasets which provide extra structural information.

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2020

UniDriveVLA: Unifying Understanding, Perception, and Action Planning for Autonomous Driving

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged in autonomous driving, with the promise of leveraging rich world knowledge to improve the cognitive capabilities of driving systems. However, adapting such models for driving tasks currently faces a critical dilemma between spatial perception and semantic reasoning. Consequently, existing VLA systems are forced into suboptimal compromises: directly adopting 2D Vision-Language Models yields limited spatial perception, whereas enhancing them with 3D spatial representations often impairs the native reasoning capacity of VLMs. We argue that this dilemma largely stems from the coupled optimization of spatial perception and semantic reasoning within shared model parameters. To overcome this, we propose UniDriveVLA, a Unified Driving Vision-Language-Action model based on Mixture-of-Transformers that addresses the perception-reasoning conflict via expert decoupling. Specifically, it comprises three experts for driving understanding, scene perception, and action planning, which are coordinated through masked joint attention. In addition, we combine a sparse perception paradigm with a three-stage progressive training strategy to improve spatial perception while maintaining semantic reasoning capability. Extensive experiments show that UniDriveVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-loop evaluation on nuScenes and closed-loop evaluation on Bench2Drive. Moreover, it demonstrates strong performance across a broad range of perception, prediction, and understanding tasks, including 3D detection, online mapping, motion forecasting, and driving-oriented VQA, highlighting its broad applicability as a unified model for autonomous driving. Code and model have been released at https://github.com/xiaomi-research/unidrivevla

Model scale versus domain knowledge in statistical forecasting of chaotic systems

Chaos and unpredictability are traditionally synonymous, yet large-scale machine learning methods recently have demonstrated a surprising ability to forecast chaotic systems well beyond typical predictability horizons. However, recent works disagree on whether specialized methods grounded in dynamical systems theory, such as reservoir computers or neural ordinary differential equations, outperform general-purpose large-scale learning methods such as transformers or recurrent neural networks. These prior studies perform comparisons on few individually-chosen chaotic systems, thereby precluding robust quantification of how statistical modeling choices and dynamical invariants of different chaotic systems jointly determine empirical predictability. Here, we perform the largest to-date comparative study of forecasting methods on the classical problem of forecasting chaos: we benchmark 24 state-of-the-art forecasting methods on a crowdsourced database of 135 low-dimensional systems with 17 forecast metrics. We find that large-scale, domain-agnostic forecasting methods consistently produce predictions that remain accurate up to two dozen Lyapunov times, thereby accessing a new long-horizon forecasting regime well beyond classical methods. We find that, in this regime, accuracy decorrelates with classical invariant measures of predictability like the Lyapunov exponent. However, in data-limited settings outside the long-horizon regime, we find that physics-based hybrid methods retain a comparative advantage due to their strong inductive biases.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 12, 2023

MixLinear: Extreme Low Resource Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with 0.1K Parameters

Recently, there has been a growing interest in Long-term Time Series Forecasting (LTSF), which involves predicting long-term future values by analyzing a large amount of historical time-series data to identify patterns and trends. There exist significant challenges in LTSF due to its complex temporal dependencies and high computational demands. Although Transformer-based models offer high forecasting accuracy, they are often too compute-intensive to be deployed on devices with hardware constraints. On the other hand, the linear models aim to reduce the computational overhead by employing either decomposition methods in the time domain or compact representations in the frequency domain. In this paper, we propose MixLinear, an ultra-lightweight multivariate time series forecasting model specifically designed for resource-constrained devices. MixLinear effectively captures both temporal and frequency domain features by modeling intra-segment and inter-segment variations in the time domain and extracting frequency variations from a low-dimensional latent space in the frequency domain. By reducing the parameter scale of a downsampled n-length input/output one-layer linear model from O(n^2) to O(n), MixLinear achieves efficient computation without sacrificing accuracy. Extensive evaluations with four benchmark datasets show that MixLinear attains forecasting performance comparable to, or surpassing, state-of-the-art models with significantly fewer parameters (0.1K), which makes it well-suited for deployment on devices with limited computational capacity.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024

Real-Time Long Horizon Air Quality Forecasting via Group-Relative Policy Optimization

Accurate long horizon forecasting of particulate matter (PM) concentration fields is essential for operational public health decisions. However, achieving reliable forecasts remains challenging in regions with complex terrain and strong atmospheric dynamics such as East Asia. While foundation models such as Aurora offer global generality, they often miss region-specific dynamics and rely on non-real-time inputs, limiting their practical utility for localized warning systems. To address this gap, we construct and release the real-world observations and high-resolution CMAQ-OBS dataset for East Asia, reducing regional error by 59.5% and enabling real-time 48-120 hour forecasts critical for public health alerts. However, standard point-wise objectives cannot reflect asymmetric operational costs, where false alarms deteriorate public trust while missed severe events endanger populations. This cost mismatch causes SFT models to over-predict and yield high False Alarm Rates. We introduce Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with class-wise rewards and curriculum rollout to align predictions with operational priorities. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the reliability of the forecast. Compared to the SFT-only baseline, our model reduces the False Alarm Rate by 47.3% while achieving a competitive F1-score, proving its effectiveness for practical, real-world air quality forecasting systems on long lead time scenarios.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025

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

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

  • 9 authors
·
May 3

Effectively Modeling Time Series with Simple Discrete State Spaces

Time series modeling is a well-established problem, which often requires that methods (1) expressively represent complicated dependencies, (2) forecast long horizons, and (3) efficiently train over long sequences. State-space models (SSMs) are classical models for time series, and prior works combine SSMs with deep learning layers for efficient sequence modeling. However, we find fundamental limitations with these prior approaches, proving their SSM representations cannot express autoregressive time series processes. We thus introduce SpaceTime, a new state-space time series architecture that improves all three criteria. For expressivity, we propose a new SSM parameterization based on the companion matrix -- a canonical representation for discrete-time processes -- which enables SpaceTime's SSM layers to learn desirable autoregressive processes. For long horizon forecasting, we introduce a "closed-loop" variation of the companion SSM, which enables SpaceTime to predict many future time-steps by generating its own layer-wise inputs. For efficient training and inference, we introduce an algorithm that reduces the memory and compute of a forward pass with the companion matrix. With sequence length ell and state-space size d, we go from O(d ell) na\"ively to O(d + ell). In experiments, our contributions lead to state-of-the-art results on extensive and diverse benchmarks, with best or second-best AUROC on 6 / 7 ECG and speech time series classification, and best MSE on 14 / 16 Informer forecasting tasks. Furthermore, we find SpaceTime (1) fits AR(p) processes that prior deep SSMs fail on, (2) forecasts notably more accurately on longer horizons than prior state-of-the-art, and (3) speeds up training on real-world ETTh1 data by 73% and 80% relative wall-clock time over Transformers and LSTMs.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 16, 2023

TimeSeriesScientist: A General-Purpose AI Agent for Time Series Analysis

Time series forecasting is central to decision-making in domains as diverse as energy, finance, climate, and public health. In practice, forecasters face thousands of short, noisy series that vary in frequency, quality, and horizon, where the dominant cost lies not in model fitting, but in the labor-intensive preprocessing, validation, and ensembling required to obtain reliable predictions. Prevailing statistical and deep learning models are tailored to specific datasets or domains and generalize poorly. A general, domain-agnostic framework that minimizes human intervention is urgently in demand. In this paper, we introduce TimeSeriesScientist (TSci), the first LLM-driven agentic framework for general time series forecasting. The framework comprises four specialized agents: Curator performs LLM-guided diagnostics augmented by external tools that reason over data statistics to choose targeted preprocessing; Planner narrows the hypothesis space of model choice by leveraging multi-modal diagnostics and self-planning over the input; Forecaster performs model fitting and validation and, based on the results, adaptively selects the best model configuration as well as ensemble strategy to make final predictions; and Reporter synthesizes the whole process into a comprehensive, transparent report. With transparent natural-language rationales and comprehensive reports, TSci transforms the forecasting workflow into a white-box system that is both interpretable and extensible across tasks. Empirical results on eight established benchmarks demonstrate that TSci consistently outperforms both statistical and LLM-based baselines, reducing forecast error by an average of 10.4% and 38.2%, respectively. Moreover, TSci produces a clear and rigorous report that makes the forecasting workflow more transparent and interpretable.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025 2

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

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

  • 5 authors
·
May 4

Huge Ensembles Part I: Design of Ensemble Weather Forecasts using Spherical Fourier Neural Operators

Studying low-likelihood high-impact extreme weather events in a warming world is a significant and challenging task for current ensemble forecasting systems. While these systems presently use up to 100 members, larger ensembles could enrich the sampling of internal variability. They may capture the long tails associated with climate hazards better than traditional ensemble sizes. Due to computational constraints, it is infeasible to generate huge ensembles (comprised of 1,000-10,000 members) with traditional, physics-based numerical models. In this two-part paper, we replace traditional numerical simulations with machine learning (ML) to generate hindcasts of huge ensembles. In Part I, we construct an ensemble weather forecasting system based on Spherical Fourier Neural Operators (SFNO), and we discuss important design decisions for constructing such an ensemble. The ensemble represents model uncertainty through perturbed-parameter techniques, and it represents initial condition uncertainty through bred vectors, which sample the fastest growing modes of the forecast. Using the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) as a baseline, we develop an evaluation pipeline composed of mean, spectral, and extreme diagnostics. Using large-scale, distributed SFNOs with 1.1 billion learned parameters, we achieve calibrated probabilistic forecasts. As the trajectories of the individual members diverge, the ML ensemble mean spectra degrade with lead time, consistent with physical expectations. However, the individual ensemble members' spectra stay constant with lead time. Therefore, these members simulate realistic weather states, and the ML ensemble thus passes a crucial spectral test in the literature. The IFS and ML ensembles have similar Extreme Forecast Indices, and we show that the ML extreme weather forecasts are reliable and discriminating.

  • 16 authors
·
Aug 6, 2024

LaDCast: A Latent Diffusion Model for Medium-Range Ensemble Weather Forecasting

Accurate probabilistic weather forecasting demands both high accuracy and efficient uncertainty quantification, challenges that overburden both ensemble numerical weather prediction (NWP) and recent machine-learning methods. We introduce LaDCast, the first global latent-diffusion framework for medium-range ensemble forecasting, which generates hourly ensemble forecasts entirely in a learned latent space. An autoencoder compresses high-dimensional ERA5 reanalysis fields into a compact representation, and a transformer-based diffusion model produces sequential latent updates with arbitrary hour initialization. The model incorporates Geometric Rotary Position Embedding (GeoRoPE) to account for the Earth's spherical geometry, a dual-stream attention mechanism for efficient conditioning, and sinusoidal temporal embeddings to capture seasonal patterns. LaDCast achieves deterministic and probabilistic skill close to that of the European Centre for Medium-Range Forecast IFS-ENS, without any explicit perturbations. Notably, LaDCast demonstrates superior performance in tracking rare extreme events such as cyclones, capturing their trajectories more accurately than established models. By operating in latent space, LaDCast reduces storage and compute by orders of magnitude, demonstrating a practical path toward forecasting at kilometer-scale resolution in real time. We open-source our code and models and provide the training and evaluation pipelines at: https://github.com/tonyzyl/ladcast.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 10, 2025

Mamba Integrated with Physics Principles Masters Long-term Chaotic System Forecasting

Long-term forecasting of chaotic systems from short-term observations remains a fundamental and underexplored challenge due to the intrinsic sensitivity to initial conditions and the complex geometry of strange attractors. Existing approaches often rely on long-term training data or focus on short-term sequence correlations, struggling to maintain predictive stability and dynamical coherence over extended horizons. We propose PhyxMamba, a novel framework that integrates a Mamba-based state-space model with physics-informed principles to capture the underlying dynamics of chaotic systems. By reconstructing the attractor manifold from brief observations using time-delay embeddings, PhyxMamba extracts global dynamical features essential for accurate forecasting. Our generative training scheme enables Mamba to replicate the physical process, augmented by multi-token prediction and attractor geometry regularization for physical constraints, enhancing prediction accuracy and preserving key statistical invariants. Extensive evaluations on diverse simulated and real-world chaotic systems demonstrate that PhyxMamba delivers superior long-term forecasting and faithfully captures essential dynamical invariants from short-term data. This framework opens new avenues for reliably predicting chaotic systems under observation-scarce conditions, with broad implications across climate science, neuroscience, epidemiology, and beyond. Our code is open-source at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/PhyxMamba.

  • 5 authors
·
May 29, 2025

IISE PG&E Energy Analytics Challenge 2025: Hourly-Binned Regression Models Beat Transformers in Load Forecasting

Accurate electricity load forecasting is essential for grid stability, resource optimization, and renewable energy integration. While transformer-based deep learning models like TimeGPT have gained traction in time-series forecasting, their effectiveness in long-term electricity load prediction remains uncertain. This study evaluates forecasting models ranging from classical regression techniques to advanced deep learning architectures using data from the ESD 2025 competition. The dataset includes two years of historical electricity load data, alongside temperature and global horizontal irradiance (GHI) across five sites, with a one-day-ahead forecasting horizon. Since actual test set load values remain undisclosed, leveraging predicted values would accumulate errors, making this a long-term forecasting challenge. We employ (i) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction and (ii) frame the task as a regression problem, using temperature and GHI as covariates to predict load for each hour, (iii) ultimately stacking 24 models to generate yearly forecasts. Our results reveal that deep learning models, including TimeGPT, fail to consistently outperform simpler statistical and machine learning approaches due to the limited availability of training data and exogenous variables. In contrast, XGBoost, with minimal feature engineering, delivers the lowest error rates across all test cases while maintaining computational efficiency. This highlights the limitations of deep learning in long-term electricity forecasting and reinforces the importance of model selection based on dataset characteristics rather than complexity. Our study provides insights into practical forecasting applications and contributes to the ongoing discussion on the trade-offs between traditional and modern forecasting methods.

  • 3 authors
·
May 16, 2025

MoHETS: Long-term Time Series Forecasting with Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts

Real-world multivariate time series can exhibit intricate multi-scale structures, including global trends, local periodicities, and non-stationary regimes, which makes long-horizon forecasting challenging. Although sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approaches improve scalability and specialization, they typically rely on homogeneous MLP experts that poorly capture the diverse temporal dynamics of time series data. We address these limitations with MoHETS, an encoder-only Transformer that integrates sparse Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts (MoHE) layers. MoHE routes temporal patches to a small subset of expert networks, combining a shared depthwise-convolution expert for sequence-level continuity with routed Fourier-based experts for patch-level periodic structures. MoHETS further improves robustness to non-stationary dynamics by incorporating exogenous information via cross-attention over covariate patch embeddings. Finally, we replace parameter-heavy linear projection heads with a lightweight convolutional patch decoder, improving parameter efficiency, reducing training instability, and allowing a single model to generalize across arbitrary forecast horizons. We validate across seven multivariate benchmarks and multiple horizons, with MoHETS consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance, reducing the average MSE by 12% compared to strong recent baselines, demonstrating effective heterogeneous specialization for long-term forecasting.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 29 1

AR-Net: A simple Auto-Regressive Neural Network for time-series

In this paper we present a new framework for time-series modeling that combines the best of traditional statistical models and neural networks. We focus on time-series with long-range dependencies, needed for monitoring fine granularity data (e.g. minutes, seconds, milliseconds), prevalent in operational use-cases. Traditional models, such as auto-regression fitted with least squares (Classic-AR) can model time-series with a concise and interpretable model. When dealing with long-range dependencies, Classic-AR models can become intractably slow to fit for large data. Recently, sequence-to-sequence models, such as Recurrent Neural Networks, which were originally intended for natural language processing, have become popular for time-series. However, they can be overly complex for typical time-series data and lack interpretability. A scalable and interpretable model is needed to bridge the statistical and deep learning-based approaches. As a first step towards this goal, we propose modelling AR-process dynamics using a feed-forward neural network approach, termed AR-Net. We show that AR-Net is as interpretable as Classic-AR but also scales to long-range dependencies. Our results lead to three major conclusions: First, AR-Net learns identical AR-coefficients as Classic-AR, thus being equally interpretable. Second, the computational complexity with respect to the order of the AR process, is linear for AR-Net as compared to a quadratic for Classic-AR. This makes it possible to model long-range dependencies within fine granularity data. Third, by introducing regularization, AR-Net automatically selects and learns sparse AR-coefficients. This eliminates the need to know the exact order of the AR-process and allows to learn sparse weights for a model with long-range dependencies.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 27, 2019

Generative Pretrained Hierarchical Transformer for Time Series Forecasting

Recent efforts have been dedicated to enhancing time series forecasting accuracy by introducing advanced network architectures and self-supervised pretraining strategies. Nevertheless, existing approaches still exhibit two critical drawbacks. Firstly, these methods often rely on a single dataset for training, limiting the model's generalizability due to the restricted scale of the training data. Secondly, the one-step generation schema is widely followed, which necessitates a customized forecasting head and overlooks the temporal dependencies in the output series, and also leads to increased training costs under different horizon length settings. To address these issues, we propose a novel generative pretrained hierarchical transformer architecture for forecasting, named GPHT. There are two aspects of key designs in GPHT. On the one hand, we advocate for constructing a mixed dataset for pretraining our model, comprising various datasets from diverse data scenarios. This approach significantly expands the scale of training data, allowing our model to uncover commonalities in time series data and facilitating improved transfer to specific datasets. On the other hand, GPHT employs an auto-regressive forecasting approach under the channel-independent assumption, effectively modeling temporal dependencies in the output series. Importantly, no customized forecasting head is required, enabling a single model to forecast at arbitrary horizon settings. We conduct sufficient experiments on eight datasets with mainstream self-supervised pretraining models and supervised models. The results demonstrated that GPHT surpasses the baseline models across various fine-tuning and zero/few-shot learning settings in the traditional long-term forecasting task, providing support for verifying the feasibility of pretrained time series large models.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 26, 2024

Proactive Model Adaptation Against Concept Drift for Online Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting always faces the challenge of concept drift, where data distributions evolve over time, leading to a decline in forecast model performance. Existing solutions are based on online learning, which continually organize recent time series observations as new training samples and update model parameters according to the forecasting feedback on recent data. However, they overlook a critical issue: obtaining ground-truth future values of each sample should be delayed until after the forecast horizon. This delay creates a temporal gap between the training samples and the test sample. Our empirical analysis reveals that the gap can introduce concept drift, causing forecast models to adapt to outdated concepts. In this paper, we present Proceed, a novel proactive model adaptation framework for online time series forecasting. Proceed first estimates the concept drift between the recently used training samples and the current test sample. It then employs an adaptation generator to efficiently translate the estimated drift into parameter adjustments, proactively adapting the model to the test sample. To enhance the generalization capability of the framework, Proceed is trained on synthetic diverse concept drifts. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets across various forecast models demonstrate that Proceed brings more performance improvements than the state-of-the-art online learning methods, significantly facilitating forecast models' resilience against concept drifts. Code is available at https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/OnlineTSF.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024

Nexus : An Agentic Framework for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is not just numerical extrapolation, but often requires reasoning with unstructured contextual data such as news or events. While specialized Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) excel at forecasting based on numerical patterns, they remain unaware to real-world textual signals. Conversely, while LLMs are emerging as zero-shot forecasters, their performance remains uneven across domains and contextual grounding. To bridge this gap, we introduce Nexus, a multi-agent forecasting framework that decomposes prediction into specialized stages: isolating macro-level and micro-level temporal fluctuations, and integrating contextual information when available before synthesizing a final forecast. This decomposition enables Nexus to adapt from seasonal signals to volatile, event-driven information without relying on external statistical anchors or monolithic prompting. We show that current-generation LLMs possess substantially stronger intrinsic forecasting ability than previously recognized, depending critically on how numerical and contextual reasoning are organized. Evaluated on data strictly succeeding LLM knowledge cutoffs spanning Zillow real estate metrics and volatile stock market equities, Nexus consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art TSFMs and strong LLM baselines. Beyond numerical accuracy, Nexus produces high-quality reasoning traces that explicitly show the fundamental drivers behind each forecast. Our results establish that real-world forecasting is an agentic reasoning problem extending well beyond only sequence modeling.

  • 9 authors
·
May 13 2

Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models

Time series forecasting holds significant importance in many real-world dynamic systems and has been extensively studied. Unlike natural language process (NLP) and computer vision (CV), where a single large model can tackle multiple tasks, models for time series forecasting are often specialized, necessitating distinct designs for different tasks and applications. While pre-trained foundation models have made impressive strides in NLP and CV, their development in time series domains has been constrained by data sparsity. Recent studies have revealed that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences of tokens. However, the challenge remains in effectively aligning the modalities of time series data and natural language to leverage these capabilities. In this work, we present Time-LLM, a reprogramming framework to repurpose LLMs for general time series forecasting with the backbone language models kept intact. We begin by reprogramming the input time series with text prototypes before feeding it into the frozen LLM to align the two modalities. To augment the LLM's ability to reason with time series data, we propose Prompt-as-Prefix (PaP), which enriches the input context and directs the transformation of reprogrammed input patches. The transformed time series patches from the LLM are finally projected to obtain the forecasts. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that Time-LLM is a powerful time series learner that outperforms state-of-the-art, specialized forecasting models. Moreover, Time-LLM excels in both few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Aardvark weather: end-to-end data-driven weather forecasting

Weather forecasting is critical for a range of human activities including transportation, agriculture, industry, as well as the safety of the general public. Machine learning models have the potential to transform the complex weather prediction pipeline, but current approaches still rely on numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems, limiting forecast speed and accuracy. Here we demonstrate that a machine learning model can replace the entire operational NWP pipeline. Aardvark Weather, an end-to-end data-driven weather prediction system, ingests raw observations and outputs global gridded forecasts and local station forecasts. Further, it can be optimised end-to-end to maximise performance over quantities of interest. Global forecasts outperform an operational NWP baseline for multiple variables and lead times. Local station forecasts are skillful up to ten days lead time and achieve comparable and often lower errors than a post-processed global NWP baseline and a state-of-the-art end-to-end forecasting system with input from human forecasters. These forecasts are produced with a remarkably simple neural process model using just 8% of the input data and three orders of magnitude less compute than existing NWP and hybrid AI-NWP methods. We anticipate that Aardvark Weather will be the starting point for a new generation of end-to-end machine learning models for medium-range forecasting that will reduce computational costs by orders of magnitude and enable the rapid and cheap creation of bespoke models for users in a variety of fields, including for the developing world where state-of-the-art local models are not currently available.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 30, 2024

A Space-Time Transformer for Precipitation Forecasting

Meteorological agencies around the world rely on real-time flood guidance to issue live-saving advisories and warnings. For decades traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models have been state-of-the-art for precipitation forecasting. However, physically-parameterized models suffer from a few core limitations: first, solving PDEs to resolve atmospheric dynamics is computationally demanding, and second, these methods degrade in performance at nowcasting timescales (i.e., 0-4 hour lead-times). Motivated by these shortcomings, recent work proposes AI-weather prediction (AI-WP) alternatives that learn to emulate analysis data with neural networks. While these data-driven approaches have enjoyed enormous success across diverse spatial and temporal resolutions, applications of video-understanding architectures for weather forecasting remain underexplored. To address these gaps, we propose SaTformer: a video transformer built on full space-time attention that skillfully forecasts extreme precipitation from satellite radiances. Along with our novel architecture, we introduce techniques to tame long-tailed precipitation datasets. Namely, we reformulate precipitation regression into a classification problem, and employ a class-weighted loss to address label imbalances. Our model scored first place on the NeurIPS Weather4Cast 2025 Cumulative Rainfall challenge. Code and model weights are available: https://github.com/leharris3/satformer

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 14, 2025

Frequency-domain MLPs are More Effective Learners in Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting has played the key role in different industrial, including finance, traffic, energy, and healthcare domains. While existing literatures have designed many sophisticated architectures based on RNNs, GNNs, or Transformers, another kind of approaches based on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are proposed with simple structure, low complexity, and {superior performance}. However, most MLP-based forecasting methods suffer from the point-wise mappings and information bottleneck, which largely hinders the forecasting performance. To overcome this problem, we explore a novel direction of applying MLPs in the frequency domain for time series forecasting. We investigate the learned patterns of frequency-domain MLPs and discover their two inherent characteristic benefiting forecasting, (i) global view: frequency spectrum makes MLPs own a complete view for signals and learn global dependencies more easily, and (ii) energy compaction: frequency-domain MLPs concentrate on smaller key part of frequency components with compact signal energy. Then, we propose FreTS, a simple yet effective architecture built upon Frequency-domain MLPs for Time Series forecasting. FreTS mainly involves two stages, (i) Domain Conversion, that transforms time-domain signals into complex numbers of frequency domain; (ii) Frequency Learning, that performs our redesigned MLPs for the learning of real and imaginary part of frequency components. The above stages operated on both inter-series and intra-series scales further contribute to channel-wise and time-wise dependency learning. Extensive experiments on 13 real-world benchmarks (including 7 benchmarks for short-term forecasting and 6 benchmarks for long-term forecasting) demonstrate our consistent superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 10, 2023

Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information

Forecasting is a critical task in decision-making across numerous domains. While historical numerical data provide a start, they fail to convey the complete context for reliable and accurate predictions. Human forecasters frequently rely on additional information, such as background knowledge and constraints, which can efficiently be communicated through natural language. However, in spite of recent progress with LLM-based forecasters, their ability to effectively integrate this textual information remains an open question. To address this, we introduce "Context is Key" (CiK), a time-series forecasting benchmark that pairs numerical data with diverse types of carefully crafted textual context, requiring models to integrate both modalities; crucially, every task in CiK requires understanding textual context to be solved successfully. We evaluate a range of approaches, including statistical models, time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasters, and propose a simple yet effective LLM prompting method that outperforms all other tested methods on our benchmark. Our experiments highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information, demonstrate surprising performance when using LLM-based forecasting models, and also reveal some of their critical shortcomings. This benchmark aims to advance multimodal forecasting by promoting models that are both accurate and accessible to decision-makers with varied technical expertise. The benchmark can be visualized at https://servicenow.github.io/context-is-key-forecasting/v0/.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024

How Good Can Linear Models Be for Time-Series Forecasting?

Time-series forecasting research has been moving steadily toward larger architectures, from specialized transformers to general-purpose foundation models, on the assumption that capacity is what unlocks accuracy. We take the opposite position: most of the gap can be closed at far lower cost by tuning preprocessing rather than scaling models. We use Ridge regression as the testbed, since it has a closed-form solution and interpretable weights, which let the optimal hyperparameters be read off the search directly. We search over context length, local normalization, regularization, and augmentation on eight standard benchmarks and find three patterns. (1) Optimal lookback is strongly series-specific and often non-monotonic in forecast horizon, with fitted power-law exponents ranging from +0.46 on ETTm2 to -0.19 on Exchange and Traffic, challenging the convention that longer horizons need longer history. (2) Normalizing over a learned trailing fraction of the context, rather than its entirety, is almost universally preferred. (3) Series within the same dataset often disagree on hyperparameters; the optimal degree of cross-series sharing varies from fully shared to fully per-series. The resulting models beat prior linear forecasters on most dataset-horizon entries and exceed Transformer, MLP, and CNN baselines on six of eight benchmarks. The optimized hyperparameters also serve as a diagnostic on the data itself, revealing structures that larger models absorb silently into their learned parameters.

SakanaAI Sakana AI
·
Jun 24 3

AutoTimes: Autoregressive Time Series Forecasters via Large Language Models

Foundation models of time series have not been fully developed due to the limited availability of time series corpora and the underexploration of scalable pre-training. Based on the similar sequential formulation of time series and natural language, increasing research demonstrates the feasibility of leveraging large language models (LLM) for time series. Nevertheless, the inherent autoregressive property and decoder-only architecture of LLMs have not been fully considered, resulting in insufficient utilization of LLM abilities. To fully revitalize the general-purpose token transition and multi-step generation capability of large language models, we propose AutoTimes to repurpose LLMs as autoregressive time series forecasters, which projects time series into the embedding space of language tokens and autoregressively generates future predictions with arbitrary lengths. Compatible with any decoder-only LLMs, the consequent forecaster exhibits the flexibility of the lookback length and scalability with larger LLMs. Further, we formulate time series as prompts, extending the context for prediction beyond the lookback window, termed in-context forecasting. By introducing LLM-embedded textual timestamps, AutoTimes can utilize chronological information to align multivariate time series. Empirically, AutoTimes achieves state-of-the-art with 0.1% trainable parameters and over 5times training/inference speedup compared to advanced LLM-based forecasters. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/AutoTimes.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 4, 2024

Large Language Model Prediction Capabilities: Evidence from a Real-World Forecasting Tournament

Accurately predicting the future would be an important milestone in the capabilities of artificial intelligence. However, research on the ability of large language models to provide probabilistic predictions about future events remains nascent. To empirically test this ability, we enrolled OpenAI's state-of-the-art large language model, GPT-4, in a three-month forecasting tournament hosted on the Metaculus platform. The tournament, running from July to October 2023, attracted 843 participants and covered diverse topics including Big Tech, U.S. politics, viral outbreaks, and the Ukraine conflict. Focusing on binary forecasts, we show that GPT-4's probabilistic forecasts are significantly less accurate than the median human-crowd forecasts. We find that GPT-4's forecasts did not significantly differ from the no-information forecasting strategy of assigning a 50% probability to every question. We explore a potential explanation, that GPT-4 might be predisposed to predict probabilities close to the midpoint of the scale, but our data do not support this hypothesis. Overall, we find that GPT-4 significantly underperforms in real-world predictive tasks compared to median human-crowd forecasts. A potential explanation for this underperformance is that in real-world forecasting tournaments, the true answers are genuinely unknown at the time of prediction; unlike in other benchmark tasks like professional exams or time series forecasting, where strong performance may at least partly be due to the answers being memorized from the training data. This makes real-world forecasting tournaments an ideal environment for testing the generalized reasoning and prediction capabilities of artificial intelligence going forward.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 17, 2023

QuantSightBench: Evaluating LLM Quantitative Forecasting with Prediction Intervals

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

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 16

Why Do Transformers Fail to Forecast Time Series In-Context?

Time series forecasting (TSF) remains a challenging and largely unsolved problem in machine learning, despite significant recent efforts leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), which predominantly rely on Transformer architectures. Empirical evidence consistently shows that even powerful Transformers often fail to outperform much simpler models, e.g., linear models, on TSF tasks; however, a rigorous theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of Transformers' limitations for TSF through the lens of In-Context Learning (ICL) theory. Specifically, under AR(p) data, we establish that: (1) Linear Self-Attention (LSA) models cannot achieve lower expected MSE than classical linear models for in-context forecasting; (2) as the context length approaches to infinity, LSA asymptotically recovers the optimal linear predictor; and (3) under Chain-of-Thought (CoT) style inference, predictions collapse to the mean exponentially. We empirically validate these findings through carefully designed experiments. Our theory not only sheds light on several previously underexplored phenomena but also offers practical insights for designing more effective forecasting architectures. We hope our work encourages the broader research community to revisit the fundamental theoretical limitations of TSF and to critically evaluate the direct application of increasingly sophisticated architectures without deeper scrutiny.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025 2

Small but Mighty: Enhancing Time Series Forecasting with Lightweight LLMs

While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable potential in time series forecasting, their practical deployment remains constrained by excessive computational demands and memory footprints. Existing LLM-based approaches typically suffer from three critical limitations: Inefficient parameter utilization in handling numerical time series patterns; Modality misalignment between continuous temporal signals and discrete text embeddings; and Inflexibility for real-time expert knowledge integration. We present SMETimes, the first systematic investigation of sub-3B parameter SLMs for efficient and accurate time series forecasting. Our approach centers on three key innovations: A statistically-enhanced prompting mechanism that bridges numerical time series with textual semantics through descriptive statistical features; A adaptive fusion embedding architecture that aligns temporal patterns with language model token spaces through learnable parameters; And a dynamic mixture-of-experts framework enabled by SLMs' computational efficiency, adaptively combining base predictions with domain-specific models. Extensive evaluations across seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that our 3B-parameter SLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on five primary datasets while maintaining 3.8x faster training and 5.2x lower memory consumption compared to 7B-parameter LLM baselines. Notably, the proposed model exhibits better learning capabilities, achieving 12.3% lower MSE than conventional LLM. Ablation studies validate that our statistical prompting and cross-modal fusion modules respectively contribute 15.7% and 18.2% error reduction in long-horizon forecasting tasks. By redefining the efficiency-accuracy trade-off landscape, this work establishes SLMs as viable alternatives to resource-intensive LLMs for practical time series forecasting. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xiyan1234567/SMETimes.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 5, 2025

Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?

Recently, there has been a surge of Transformer-based solutions for the long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) task. Despite the growing performance over the past few years, we question the validity of this line of research in this work. Specifically, Transformers is arguably the most successful solution to extract the semantic correlations among the elements in a long sequence. However, in time series modeling, we are to extract the temporal relations in an ordered set of continuous points. While employing positional encoding and using tokens to embed sub-series in Transformers facilitate preserving some ordering information, the nature of the permutation-invariant self-attention mechanism inevitably results in temporal information loss. To validate our claim, we introduce a set of embarrassingly simple one-layer linear models named LTSF-Linear for comparison. Experimental results on nine real-life datasets show that LTSF-Linear surprisingly outperforms existing sophisticated Transformer-based LTSF models in all cases, and often by a large margin. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive empirical studies to explore the impacts of various design elements of LTSF models on their temporal relation extraction capability. We hope this surprising finding opens up new research directions for the LTSF task. We also advocate revisiting the validity of Transformer-based solutions for other time series analysis tasks (e.g., anomaly detection) in the future. Code is available at: https://github.com/cure-lab/LTSF-Linear.

  • 4 authors
·
May 26, 2022

Balancing Computational Efficiency and Forecast Error in Machine Learning-based Time-Series Forecasting: Insights from Live Experiments on Meteorological Nowcasting

Machine learning for time-series forecasting remains a key area of research. Despite successful application of many machine learning techniques, relating computational efficiency to forecast error remains an under-explored domain. This paper addresses this topic through a series of real-time experiments to quantify the relationship between computational cost and forecast error using meteorological nowcasting as an example use-case. We employ a variety of popular regression techniques (XGBoost, FC-MLP, Transformer, and LSTM) for multi-horizon, short-term forecasting of three variables (temperature, wind speed, and cloud cover) for multiple locations. During a 5-day live experiment, 4000 data sources were streamed for training and inferencing 144 models per hour. These models were parameterized to explore forecast error for two computational cost minimization methods: a novel auto-adaptive data reduction technique (Variance Horizon) and a performance-based concept drift-detection mechanism. Forecast error of all model variations were benchmarked in real-time against a state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction model. Performance was assessed using classical and novel evaluation metrics. Results indicate that using the Variance Horizon reduced computational usage by more than 50\%, while increasing between 0-15\% in error. Meanwhile, performance-based retraining reduced computational usage by up to 90\% while also improving forecast error by up to 10\%. Finally, the combination of both the Variance Horizon and performance-based retraining outperformed other model configurations by up to 99.7\% when considering error normalized to computational usage.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26, 2023

BALM-TSF: Balanced Multimodal Alignment for LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is a long-standing and highly challenging research topic. Recently, driven by the rise of large language models (LLMs), research has increasingly shifted from purely time series methods toward harnessing textual modalities to enhance forecasting performance. However, the vast discrepancy between text and temporal data often leads current multimodal architectures to over-emphasise one modality while neglecting the other, resulting in information loss that harms forecasting performance. To address this modality imbalance, we introduce BALM-TSF (Balanced Multimodal Alignment for LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting), a lightweight time series forecasting framework that maintains balance between the two modalities. Specifically, raw time series are processed by the time series encoder, while descriptive statistics of raw time series are fed to an LLM with learnable prompt, producing compact textual embeddings. To ensure balanced cross-modal context alignment of time series and textual embeddings, a simple yet effective scaling strategy combined with a contrastive objective then maps these textual embeddings into the latent space of the time series embeddings. Finally, the aligned textual semantic embeddings and time series embeddings are together integrated for forecasting. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that, with minimal trainable parameters, BALM-TSF achieves state-of-the-art performance in both long-term and few-shot forecasting, confirming its ability to harness complementary information from text and time series. Code is available at https://github.com/ShiqiaoZhou/BALM-TSF.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 30, 2025

Extending SST Anomaly Forecasts Through Simultaneous Decomposition of Seasonal and PDO Modes

We present a new approach to forecasting North Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) by recognizing that interannual variability primarily reflects amplitude changes in four dominant seasonal cycles. Our multivariate linear model simultaneously captures these amplitude-modulated seasonal cycles along with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which naturally emerges as an intrinsic feature of the system rather than a separate phenomenon. Using sixteen-dimensional regression based on four spatially distributed time series per variable, the model delivers unprecedented forecast accuracy for both interannual amplitude modulations and PDO evolution, maintaining skill beyond 36 months -- a substantial improvement over current operational and research forecasts, including machine learning methods. Predictions initialized in 2024 project that the PDO will remain in its negative phase through late 2026, implying reduced likelihood of severe marine heatwaves in the eastern North Pacific during this period. These findings have direct implications for regional climate impacts, including storm tracks, precipitation patterns, and marine ecosystem health. By treating seasonal and interannual variability as coupled rather than independent processes, this framework advances our understanding of North Pacific climate dynamics and provides a powerful tool for stakeholders managing climate-sensitive resources and planning adaptation strategies in regions strongly influenced by North Pacific conditions.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 5

FreqLite: A Lightweight Frequency-Decomposed Linear Model with Adaptive Reversible Normalization for Robust Long-Term Time-Series Forecasting

Long-term time-series forecasting needs models that are accurate yet efficient enough for commodity hardware. Lightweight linear forecasters are remarkably strong in this regime, yet they leave two openings: reversible instance normalization (RevIN) de-normalizes the entire horizon with a single lookback statistic, which is inaccurate under non-stationarity, and time-domain trend/seasonal decomposition relies on a fixed, non-adaptive filter. We present FreqLite, an ultra-lightweight, channel-independent frequency-decomposed linear forecaster: a learnable, lossless, partition-of-unity spectral filter splits the input into bands that are forecast by per-band linear heads and, unlike low-pass-truncation approaches, the high-frequency band is retained and modeled. FreqLite is the best lightweight model on the standard long-term forecasting benchmarks and, at long lookback (L=336), attains a lower average error than a PatchTST Transformer (0.3244 vs. 0.3587 MSE) while using 4x fewer parameters, 2.2x less memory, and 2.2x less time per epoch on a single 4 GB laptop GPU; although modest in magnitude, its improvements are statistically significant under paired Wilcoxon tests across all matched cells (p < 1e-5). We further introduce Adaptive Reversible Instance Normalization (A-RevIN), a regime-adaptive reversible normalization that strictly generalizes RevIN (recovered exactly when its gate is closed), engages under non-stationarity, and reduces to RevIN without harm on stationary data. We validate this on both a real strongly non-stationary dataset (ILI, up to ~5% MSE reduction) and a controlled synthetic drift sweep in which A-RevIN's benefit and its learned gate both rise monotonically with injected non-stationarity. Every component is independently ablatable (Linear and RLinear are special cases of FreqLite), and all results are reproducible on commodity hardware.

  • 2 authors
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May 30

The Memorization Problem: Can We Trust LLMs' Economic Forecasts?

Large language models (LLMs) cannot be trusted for economic forecasts during periods covered by their training data. We provide the first systematic evaluation of LLMs' memorization of economic and financial data, including major economic indicators, news headlines, stock returns, and conference calls. Our findings show that LLMs can perfectly recall the exact numerical values of key economic variables from before their knowledge cutoff dates. This recall appears to be randomly distributed across different dates and data types. This selective perfect memory creates a fundamental issue -- when testing forecasting capabilities before their knowledge cutoff dates, we cannot distinguish whether LLMs are forecasting or simply accessing memorized data. Explicit instructions to respect historical data boundaries fail to prevent LLMs from achieving recall-level accuracy in forecasting tasks. Further, LLMs seem exceptional at reconstructing masked entities from minimal contextual clues, suggesting that masking provides inadequate protection against motivated reasoning. Our findings raise concerns about using LLMs to forecast historical data or backtest trading strategies, as their apparent predictive success may merely reflect memorization rather than genuine economic insight. Any application where future knowledge would change LLMs' outputs can be affected by memorization. In contrast, consistent with the absence of data contamination, LLMs cannot recall data after their knowledge cutoff date.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 20, 2025

TiRex: Zero-Shot Forecasting Across Long and Short Horizons with Enhanced In-Context Learning

In-context learning, the ability of large language models to perform tasks using only examples provided in the prompt, has recently been adapted for time series forecasting. This paradigm enables zero-shot prediction, where past values serve as context for forecasting future values, making powerful forecasting tools accessible to non-experts and increasing the performance when training data are scarce. Most existing zero-shot forecasting approaches rely on transformer architectures, which, despite their success in language, often fall short of expectations in time series forecasting, where recurrent models like LSTMs frequently have the edge. Conversely, while LSTMs are well-suited for time series modeling due to their state-tracking capabilities, they lack strong in-context learning abilities. We introduce TiRex that closes this gap by leveraging xLSTM, an enhanced LSTM with competitive in-context learning skills. Unlike transformers, state-space models, or parallelizable RNNs such as RWKV, TiRex retains state-tracking, a critical property for long-horizon forecasting. To further facilitate its state-tracking ability, we propose a training-time masking strategy called CPM. TiRex sets a new state of the art in zero-shot time series forecasting on the HuggingFace benchmarks GiftEval and Chronos-ZS, outperforming significantly larger models including TabPFN-TS (Prior Labs), Chronos Bolt (Amazon), TimesFM (Google), and Moirai (Salesforce) across both short- and long-term forecasts.

  • 6 authors
·
May 29, 2025

FourCastNet 3: A geometric approach to probabilistic machine-learning weather forecasting at scale

FourCastNet 3 advances global weather modeling by implementing a scalable, geometric machine learning (ML) approach to probabilistic ensemble forecasting. The approach is designed to respect spherical geometry and to accurately model the spatially correlated probabilistic nature of the problem, resulting in stable spectra and realistic dynamics across multiple scales. FourCastNet 3 delivers forecasting accuracy that surpasses leading conventional ensemble models and rivals the best diffusion-based methods, while producing forecasts 8 to 60 times faster than these approaches. In contrast to other ML approaches, FourCastNet 3 demonstrates excellent probabilistic calibration and retains realistic spectra, even at extended lead times of up to 60 days. All of these advances are realized using a purely convolutional neural network architecture tailored for spherical geometry. Scalable and efficient large-scale training on 1024 GPUs and more is enabled by a novel training paradigm for combined model- and data-parallelism, inspired by domain decomposition methods in classical numerical models. Additionally, FourCastNet 3 enables rapid inference on a single GPU, producing a 60-day global forecast at 0.25{\deg}, 6-hourly resolution in under 4 minutes. Its computational efficiency, medium-range probabilistic skill, spectral fidelity, and rollout stability at subseasonal timescales make it a strong candidate for improving meteorological forecasting and early warning systems through large ensemble predictions.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 16, 2025

OneForecast: A Universal Framework for Global and Regional Weather Forecasting

Accurate weather forecasts are important for disaster prevention, agricultural planning, etc. Traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods offer physically interpretable high-accuracy predictions but are computationally expensive and fail to fully leverage rapidly growing historical data. In recent years, deep learning models have made significant progress in weather forecasting, but challenges remain, such as balancing global and regional high-resolution forecasts, excessive smoothing in extreme event predictions, and insufficient dynamic system modeling. To address these issues, this paper proposes a global-regional nested weather forecasting framework (OneForecast) based on graph neural networks. By combining a dynamic system perspective with multi-grid theory, we construct a multi-scale graph structure and densify the target region to capture local high-frequency features. We introduce an adaptive messaging mechanism, using dynamic gating units to deeply integrate node and edge features for more accurate extreme event forecasting. For high-resolution regional forecasts, we propose a neural nested grid method to mitigate boundary information loss. Experimental results show that OneForecast performs excellently across global to regional scales and short-term to long-term forecasts, especially in extreme event predictions. Codes link https://github.com/YuanGao-YG/OneForecast.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 1, 2025

Adapting LLMs to Time Series Forecasting via Temporal Heterogeneity Modeling and Semantic Alignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing due to their strong generalization and sequence modeling capabilities. However, their direct application to time series forecasting remains challenging due to two fundamental issues: the inherent heterogeneity of temporal patterns and the modality gap between continuous numerical signals and discrete language representations. In this work, we propose TALON, a unified framework that enhances LLM-based forecasting by modeling temporal heterogeneity and enforcing semantic alignment. Specifically, we design a Heterogeneous Temporal Encoder that partitions multivariate time series into structurally coherent segments, enabling localized expert modeling across diverse temporal patterns. To bridge the modality gap, we introduce a Semantic Alignment Module that aligns temporal features with LLM-compatible representations, enabling effective integration of time series into language-based models while eliminating the need for handcrafted prompts during inference. Extensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TALON achieves superior performance across all datasets, with average MSE improvements of up to 11\% over recent state-of-the-art methods. These results underscore the effectiveness of incorporating both pattern-aware and semantic-aware designs when adapting LLMs for time series forecasting. The code is available at: https://github.com/syrGitHub/TALON.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 10, 2025

Unfolding AIS transmission behavior for vessel movement modeling on noisy data leveraging machine learning

The oceans are a source of an impressive mixture of complex data that could be used to uncover relationships yet to be discovered. Such data comes from the oceans and their surface, such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages used for tracking vessels' trajectories. AIS messages are transmitted over radio or satellite at ideally periodic time intervals but vary irregularly over time. As such, this paper aims to model the AIS message transmission behavior through neural networks for forecasting upcoming AIS messages' content from multiple vessels, particularly in a simultaneous approach despite messages' temporal irregularities as outliers. We present a set of experiments comprising multiple algorithms for forecasting tasks with horizon sizes of varying lengths. Deep learning models (e.g., neural networks) revealed themselves to adequately preserve vessels' spatial awareness regardless of temporal irregularity. We show how convolutional layers, feed-forward networks, and recurrent neural networks can improve such tasks by working together. Experimenting with short, medium, and large-sized sequences of messages, our model achieved 36/37/38% of the Relative Percentage Difference - the lower, the better, whereas we observed 92/45/96% on the Elman's RNN, 51/52/40% on the GRU, and 129/98/61% on the LSTM. These results support our model as a driver for improving the prediction of vessel routes when analyzing multiple vessels of diverging types simultaneously under temporally noise data.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 24, 2022

From Similarity to Superiority: Channel Clustering for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting has attracted significant attention in recent decades. Previous studies have demonstrated that the Channel-Independent (CI) strategy improves forecasting performance by treating different channels individually, while it leads to poor generalization on unseen instances and ignores potentially necessary interactions between channels. Conversely, the Channel-Dependent (CD) strategy mixes all channels with even irrelevant and indiscriminate information, which, however, results in oversmoothing issues and limits forecasting accuracy. There is a lack of channel strategy that effectively balances individual channel treatment for improved forecasting performance without overlooking essential interactions between channels. Motivated by our observation of a correlation between the time series model's performance boost against channel mixing and the intrinsic similarity on a pair of channels, we developed a novel and adaptable Channel Clustering Module (CCM). CCM dynamically groups channels characterized by intrinsic similarities and leverages cluster information instead of individual channel identities, combining the best of CD and CI worlds. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CCM can (1) boost the performance of CI and CD models by an average margin of 2.4% and 7.2% on long-term and short-term forecasting, respectively; (2) enable zero-shot forecasting with mainstream time series forecasting models; (3) uncover intrinsic time series patterns among channels and improve interpretability of complex time series models.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 30, 2024