Recent years have witnessed the emergence of multivariate modeling using time series foundation models (TSFMs), which achieve advanced zero-shot generalization. Modern multivariate TSFMs are predominantly pretrained on multivariate synthetic data, which is easier to scale but may fail to capture the complex temporal dynamics and cross-variable relationships present in real-world time series.
The paper introduces SimpleTimeBench, a diagnostic suite testing basic temporal primitives like monotonic trends, periodic signals, and leading indicator covariates. It finds that prominent multivariate Time Series Foundation Models (Chronos‑2, Moirai, and Toto) often produce suboptimal zero‑shot forecasts for these simple patterns, and that fine‑tuning can improve specific tasks while harming performance on other fundamentals. These failures persist in real‑world sensor forecasting, indicating that current TSFMs may lack the inductive biases needed to capture straightforward relationships, thereby limiting their practical reliability.
By Nafiseh Ghoroghchian, Haipeng Zhang, Shuyi Han, Alex Labach, George Stein
arXiv:2607. 01204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce TiRex-2, a recurrent xLSTM-based time series foundation model that generalizes the univariate TiRex to multivariate forecasting with both past and future covariates.
By Patrick Podest, Marco Pichler, Elias B\"urger, Levente Z\'olyomi, Bernhard Voggenberger, Wilhelm Berghammer, Daniel Klotz, Sebastian B\"ock, G\"unter Klambauer, Sepp Hochreiter
arXiv:2606. 10798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained time series foundation models (TSFMs) have enabled zero-shot forecasting on unseen target series.
By Yosuke Yamaguchi, Issei Suemitsu, Yuki Kajihara, Wenpeng Wei
arXiv:2607. 16251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models (STFMs) aim to learn generalizable representations of complex dynamical systems across space and time.
By Yutong Feng, Shiyuan Piao, Yutong Xia, Xu Liu, Wenqi Fan, Fugee Tsung, See-Kiong Ng, Yuxuan Liang
arXiv:2605. 27286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are transforming the forecasting paradigm through large-scale cross-domain pretraining.
By Yiding Liu, Yifan Hu, Hongjie Xia, Peiyuan Liu, Hongzhou Chen, Xilin Dai, Zewei Dong, Jiang-Ming Yang
arXiv:2602. 12147v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are revolutionizing the forecasting landscape from specific dataset modeling to generalizable task evaluation.
By Zhongzheng Qiao, Sheng Pan, Anni Wang, Viktoriya Zhukova, Yong Liu, Xudong Jiang, Qingsong Wen, Mingsheng Long, Ming Jin, Chenghao Liu
arXiv:2512.07624v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Process Model Forecasting (PMF) aims to predict how the control-flow structure of a process evolves over time by modeling the temporal dynamics of...
By Yongbo Yu, Jari Peeperkorn, Johannes De Smedt, Jochen De Weerdt
arXiv:2503. 24007v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In time series forecasting, covariates represent external factors that influence target variables.
By Yosuke Yamaguchi, Issei Suemitsu, Wenpeng Wei
QUALS is a large‑scale time‑series corpus equilibrium framework designed to improve data efficiency for zero‑shot forecasting. It uses pattern quantization to decode heterogeneous patterns from mixed corpora and a learnability synchronization mechanism to calibrate sampling weights, bridging the optimization gap between simple and complex motifs. Benchmarks show that pre‑training on QUALS yields superior zero‑shot performance even with reduced training budgets.
By Yujie Li, Zezhi Shao, Chengqing Yu, Yisong Fu, Weijie Zhu, Yifan Du, Jilin Hu, Bin Yang, Yongjun Xu, Fei Wang
arXiv:2606. 05264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training robust multivariate time series forecasting models requires large, diverse corpora, yet many real-world domains provide only a handful of observed sequences.
By Moulik Gupta (Birla AI Labs), Dhruv Kumar (Birla AI Labs, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani), Murari Mandal (Birla AI Labs, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology), Saurabh Deshpande (Birla AI Labs)
SMart is a new time series representation learning framework that combines a multi-phase recurrence plot recovery task with a source dataset selector. The recovery task uses three alternative modes to guide the encoder in capturing time series dynamics, while the selector chooses multiple suitable source datasets to augment the target dataset during pre‑training. Experiments demonstrate that SMart surpasses state‑of‑the‑art models, reducing mean absolute error by up to 19.5% in regression and increasing classification accuracy by up to 1.34%.
By Fang He, Wang-chien Lee