用可学习序列增强Transformer,提升时间序列预测精度
Sequence Complementor: Complementing Transformers For Time Series Forecasting with Learnable Sequences

- 引入可学习的序列补全器,为注意力机制提供额外信息
- 序列表示熵越高,预测误差越低,性能显著优于现有方法
- 适合需要高精度长期/短期预测的工业场景
自引入以来,Transformer通过捕捉时序标记间的全局依赖关系,改变了时间序列预测的发展方向。后续研究主要通过调整标记化和自注意力模块来应对非平稳性、通道依赖和变量相关性等挑战。然而,我们发现序列表示的表达能力是影响Transformer预测性能的关键因素,序列表示熵与均方误差之间存在近乎线性的关系,多样性更高的表示表现更优。本文提出一种新型注意力机制——序列补全器(Sequence Complementors),从信息论角度证明其可行性,这些可学习序列能够向注意力机制提供当前输入之外的补充信息。进一步通过理论支持的多样化损失函数优化补全器。长期与短期预测的实证评估表明,该方法在多个基准上超越了近期最先进模型。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Since its introduction, the transformer has shifted the development trajectory away from traditional models (e.g., RNN, MLP) in time series forecasting, which is attributed to its ability to capture global dependencies within temporal tokens. Follow-up studies have largely involved altering the tokenization and self-attention modules to better adapt Transformers for addressing special challenges like non-stationarity, channel-wise dependency, and variable correlation in time series. However, we found that the expressive capability of sequence representation is a key factor influencing Transformer performance in time forecasting after investigating several representative methods, where there is an almost linear relationship between sequence representation entropy and mean square error, with more diverse representations performing better. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism with Sequence Complementors and prove feasible from an information theory perspective, where these learnable sequences are able to provide complementary information beyond current input to feed attention. We further enhance the Sequence Complementors via a diversification loss that is theoretically covered. The empirical evaluation of both long-term and short-term forecasting has confirmed its superiority over the recent state-of-the-art methods.
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