arXiv AI

Expectations vs. Realities: The Cost of MSE-Optimal Forecasting Under Conditional Uncertainty

arXiv:2606. 04342v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step time series forecasting (MSF) is commonly evaluated using point-wise error metrics such as mean squared error (MSE), implicitly treating the conditional mean as a sufficient target.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

When Should a World Model Move? Loss-Conditioned State Execution

The paper introduces loss‑conditioned state execution, a model‑agnostic technique that decides whether to apply a world model’s proposed state change or keep the current state based on whether the change reduces downstream loss. It formalizes state movability as the existence of a loss‑reducing feasible correction and constructs loss‑specific proposals from predictive distributions, executing them only when a groupwise lower confidence bound on loss improvement is positive. Experiments on forecasting and dynamics benchmarks show that the method accepts updates for a subset of cases, achieving lower bounded loss than persistence or always executing the proposal, and highlights that event predictability and loss‑based decisions must be evaluated separately.

By Jintao Xu, Zhengyu Chen, Ben Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Jianshen Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Beyond MSE: Rethinking the Evaluation Metric and Benchmarking for Irregular Time Series Forecasting

The paper critiques the prevalent use of mean squared error (MSE) for evaluating irregular time‑series forecasting, arguing that MSE is biased by timestamp sampling distributions. It introduces the Continuous‑time Squared Error (CSE), an importance‑weighted metric that theoretically offers a tighter asymptotic bound on continuous‑time risk than MSE. A comprehensive benchmark across synthetic, semi‑synthetic, and eight real‑world datasets demonstrates that CSE more accurately recovers continuous‑time risk, revealing limitations of relying solely on MSE.

By Rongwen Li, Haixin Xie, Xiao Wang, Changjian Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 4

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

RATL is a plug‑in method for multivariate time‑series forecasting that uses a frozen base forecaster to build a memory of its historical forecast residuals. During inference, RATL retrieves residual trajectories from similar past contexts and employs a set‑aware router to combine them, providing learned feedback correction. Experiments demonstrate that this residual‑retrieval approach improves the performance of the base forecaster across various benchmarks and backbones.

By Yuchen He, Yueyang Cang, Zhiyuan Ning, Ningyu Wang, Li Shi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

A Control Theory of Predictability in Latent World Models

arXiv:2607. 10362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models are trained to predict future states in a learned representation and are then deployed inside a planner that selects actions by simulating them forward.

By Hanzhe You, Yonggang Zhang, Maohao Ran, Zhiqin Yang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Wei Xue, Jun Song, Xinmei Tian, Yike Guo