Do Time-Series Forecasters Use the Right History: Recoverability, Recovery, and Functional Use of Temporal Delays
arXiv:2608. 10433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forecast accuracy does not tell us which past inputs produced a prediction.
arXiv:2608. 10433v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal reports are increasingly emitted alongside numerical forecasts and are often interpreted as statements about the computation producing those forecasts.
arXiv:2608. 10433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forecast accuracy does not tell us which past inputs produced a prediction.
Forecast accuracy does not tell us which past inputs produced a prediction. We separate three questions for time-series models with known delay structure: can the true delay be recovered from the observed data, does the model report it, and does the forecast actually use the same history?
arXiv:2608. 10433v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-series forecasters increasingly accompany numerical predictions with explicit temporal reports, such as delays or selected history, but a correct report need not describe the information actually used by the forecast.
arXiv:2608. 06765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous-time dynamic graph models predict future links by compressing past interactions into neural states.
arXiv:2608. 10553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal prediction (CP) provides distribution-free prediction intervals for fixed forecasters, but its standard calibration procedure is often inefficient for time series data, where forecast errors are temporally dependent and change across time and operating conditions.
The paper introduces Horizon-Resolved eXplanation (HRX), a framework that adds a horizon axis to time‑series forecasting explanations, allowing each forecast step to have its own importance map. HRX operates as a plug‑in for any differentiable forecaster, includes an evaluation protocol that tests the impact of removing top‑ranked inputs, and a rank criterion to decide when horizon resolution is beneficial. Experiments across multiple backbones and datasets demonstrate that incorporating the horizon axis improves explanation quality and that the step‑wise dependence is low‑dimensional, requiring only a few shared maps regardless of forecast length.
arXiv:2609. 20193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval plug-ins supply a deep forecaster with information its lookback window cannot carry.
arXiv:2608. 16098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate time-series forecasting faces a structural dilemma: sharing one temporal predictor across variables is parameter-efficient but forces heterogeneous variables through an identical history-to-future map, whereas learning an independent predictor per variable restores flexibility at a cost that grows with the product of variable count, context length, and horizon.
The paper introduces paired, mechanism‑controlled stress tests that decompose changes in expected squared error for time‑series forecasting into environmental risk and forecast‑oracle distance. Using an origin‑conditioned predictive oracle, the authors validate three end‑to‑end controls and apply the benchmark to 24 forecasters, revealing that many models exhibit higher realized MSE yet lower oracle distance under frequent switching, and that environmental risk dominates in most scenarios. The study also demonstrates that visually compelling discovery profiles often fail to replicate on independent data‑generating process realizations, underscoring the importance of component‑wise diagnosis and held‑out stability audits.
arXiv:2608. 14903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantitative forecasts of frontier artificial intelligence often connect dated targets to trends in benchmark scores, training compute, release time, or expert belief.
arXiv:2609.23074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forecasters often know an event is imminent but not the shape, size, or timing of its effect. We introduce Event Signature Transfer (EST), a training...
The paper investigates when auxiliary context can genuinely improve multi‑modal time series forecasting. It identifies two necessary dataset‑level conditions: the target must not be dominated by a last‑value shortcut (low autocorrelation) and the context must provide additional information beyond history (non‑zero conditional mutual information). Experiments on a large mixture‑of‑experts model and several fusion mechanisms show that only when both conditions hold does context routing yield a substantial reduction in mean‑squared error; otherwise its contribution collapses to a capacity floor.