arXiv Machine Learning

Foundations without Fundamentals: Zero-Shot Blind Spots in Time Series FMs

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 7

RMISC: A Large-scale Real-world Multivariate Corpus for Time Series Foundation Models

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Time-Aware Prior Fitted Networks for Zero-Shot Forecasting with Exogenous Variables

arXiv:2603. 15802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In many time series forecasting settings, the target time series is accompanied by exogenous covariates, such as promotions and prices in retail demand; temperature in energy load; calendar and holiday indicators for traffic or sales; and grid load or fuel costs in electricity pricing.

By Andres Potapczynski, Ravi Kiran Selvam, Tatiana Konstantinova, Malcolm Wolff, Kin G. Olivares, Ruijun Ma, Michael W. Mahoney, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Boris N. Oreshkin, Dmitry Efimov
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

Exploring Zero-Shot Foundation Models for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2607. 12454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection (MTSAD) is essential for reliability and safety in domains such as industrial process monitoring and financial risk management, yet conventional approaches rely on application-specific models that are costly to train and hard to scale.

By Martin Uray, Saverio Messineo, Roland Kwitt, Stefan Huber
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

A Hybrid Attention Model Learning Unified Time-aware Patch Representation for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

The paper introduces a hybrid attention model that learns a unified time‑aware patch representation for irregular multivariate time series (IMTS) forecasting. It employs a time‑aware patch encoding to embed variable‑length intra‑patch timestamps, a time bias attention mechanism to adjust for temporal misalignment and asynchronous cross‑channel dependencies, and a hybrid causal mask on a decoder‑only Transformer to balance historical context with autoregressive forecasting. The authors also curate VersaTSA, a 30 B‑observation dataset preserving native sampling sparsity, and demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art zero‑shot performance on three IMTS benchmarks while remaining competitive on regular MTS tasks.

By Zhihao Lin, Li Lin, Qi Zhang, Kaiwen Xia, Shuai Wang, Jialin Qiao