WhatIf-Bench is a semi‑synthetic benchmark that tests how well time‑series forecasters use covariates to predict a target’s response to future events. It generates 37,665 tasks from mechanistic simulators of data centers, power grids, road traffic, and water networks, varying covariate numbers, historical events, and event length. Evaluation shows large‑language models outperform the best time‑series foundation models, with all models performing well on replayed events but struggling on novel covariate settings, highlighting generalization as the main challenge.
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.
arXiv:2609.39386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are evaluated as forecasters of future values, yet for sparse series many decisions depend only on whi...
arXiv:2607. 19659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models can forecast across heterogeneous domains without task-specific training, but their forecasts are fixed once produced and cannot directly incorporate task-specific expert feedback.
Timer‑M1 is a pretrained multivariate time‑series foundation model that learns with primitives for zero‑shot forecasting. It uses a primitive‑based data synthesis and pretraining pipeline to generate series with shared temporal and relational patterns, assembling them into multivariate samples with distinct channel roles. The model employs gated two‑dimensional Transformer blocks that dynamically allocate cross‑variate attention, achieving top performance on several large‑scale forecasting benchmarks.
The paper investigates how different calendar feature encodings influence the performance of covariate-informed time series foundation models (TSFMs). Seven encoding schemes—three target‑agnostic (ordinal, one‑hot, cyclic) and four target‑based—are systematically compared across four state‑of‑the‑art TSFMs on nine datasets that reflect social activity patterns such as weekends and holidays. Results show that encoding choice can change forecast accuracy by up to 9.9 % on non‑holidays and 83 % on holidays, with improvements mainly around holidays and varying effects across models.
arXiv:2503. 24007v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In time series forecasting, covariates represent external factors that influence target variables.
arXiv:2606. 18049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-making with deep learning-based time series forecasting requires not only accurate predictions but also actionable insights.
arXiv:2604. 22328v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Driven by the transition towards a climate-neutral energy system, accurate energy time series forecasting is critical for planning and operations.
The paper argues that current time‑series forecasting benchmarks are too narrow, rewarding low held‑out error while failing to capture real‑world failure modes such as structured input anomalies, regime shifts, and sensor faults. It proposes scenario‑grounded stress testing, where each test includes historical data, future targets, a semantic scenario, a failure operator, and a difficulty level, to make evaluation interpretable and deployment‑relevant.
arXiv:2609.36966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Covariate effects vary across contexts and shift over time, requiring forecasters to assess how to use them for each forecasting context. As forecast...
arXiv:2609.06656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern power systems are growing increasingly complex as they integrate diverse generation sources to meet rising demand, making accurate load foreca...
arXiv:2609.24559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present $t_0$, a family of open-weights foundation models for forecasting with multivariate context. We release its first two members: $\texttt{t0-a...