arXiv:2509.13906cs.LG2025-09中稿 · CIKM 2025被引 2

轻量级适配器让时间序列大模型用上外部变量,无需微调就能显著提效。

TFMAdapter: Lightweight Instance-Level Adaptation of Foundation Models for Forecasting with Covariates

  • 通过非参数级联融合外部变量与基础模型预测结果
  • 在真实数据集上比基线模型提升24%-27%性能
  • 适合需要快速部署且资源受限的预测场景

时间序列基础模型(TSFMs)在仅依赖历史值的单变量预测任务中已达到顶尖水平,证明大规模跨领域预训练可获得从简短历史中泛化的时间模式归纳偏置。然而,大多数TSFMs无法利用协变量——许多实际应用中关键的未来可用外生变量——因其领域特异性及缺乏相关归纳偏置。我们提出TFMAdapter,一种轻量级、实例级适配器,可在不微调的前提下为TSFMs注入协变量信息。该方法不重新训练模型,而是在单次调用中基于有限历史,学习一个非参数级联结构,将协变量与单变量TSFM预测结合。但此类学习需历史每一步的单变量预测,导致调用次数过多。为此,TFMAdapter采用两阶段方法:(1) 使用简单回归模型生成伪预测;(2) 训练高斯过程回归器,结合伪预测与真实TSFM预测及协变量进行优化。在多个真实世界数据集上的实验表明,TFMAdapter始终优于基础模型与监督基线,相比基线模型性能提升24-27%,且数据与计算开销极小。结果凸显了轻量级适配器在弥合通用基础模型与特定领域需求间差距的潜力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in univariate forecasting on new time series simply by conditioned on a brief history of past values. Their success demonstrates that large-scale pretraining across diverse domains can acquire the inductive bias to generalize from temporal patterns in a brief history. However, most TSFMs are unable to leverage covariates -- future-available exogenous variables critical for accurate forecasting in many applications -- due to their domain-specific nature and the lack of associated inductive bias. We propose TFMAdapter, a lightweight, instance-level adapter that augments TSFMs with covariate information without fine-tuning. Instead of retraining, TFMAdapter operates on the limited history provided during a single model call, learning a non-parametric cascade that combines covariates with univariate TSFM forecasts. However, such learning would require univariate forecasts at all steps in the history, requiring too many calls to the TSFM. To enable training on the full historical context while limiting TSFM invocations, TFMAdapter uses a two-stage method: (1) generating pseudo-forecasts with a simple regression model, and (2) training a Gaussian Process regressor to refine predictions using both pseudo- and TSFM forecasts alongside covariates. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TFMAdapter consistently outperforms both foundation models and supervised baselines, achieving a 24-27\% improvement over base foundation models with minimal data and computational overhead. Our results highlight the potential of lightweight adapters to bridge the gap between generic foundation models and domain-specific forecasting needs.

时间序列预测基础模型协变量轻量适配

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