给时间序列加噪声,让现成大模型更准地预测未来。
Enhancing Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting in Off-the-Shelf LLMs via Noise Injection
- 输入数据加噪声,提升冻结大模型的泛化能力。
- 在多个新数据集上显著降低预测误差,最高提升18.7%。
- 无需微调,适合快速部署于真实时序场景。
大型语言模型(LLMs)在零样本时间序列(TS)预测中表现出色。核心挑战在于将时间序列数据转化为与预训练知识对齐的文本表示。现有方法常依赖微调专用模块来弥合这一差距,而本研究探索完全不进行微调的“纯现成”大模型范式,仅通过策略性数值序列分词实现预测。此类全冻结模型性能极度依赖输入文本表示,因参数无法适应分布偏移。本文提出一种简单但高效的方法:在原始时间序列中注入噪声,该非侵入性干预作为推理时增强手段,迫使冻结模型基于稳健的时间模式推断,而非表层数值特征。我们从理论上分析此现象,并在多种基准上实证其有效性。尤为关键的是,为消除大模型预训练数据可能带来的偏差,我们构建了两个全新时间序列数据集,均不在所用大模型的预训练范围内,结果一致显示性能提升。本研究进一步推进了直接利用现成大模型进行时间序列预测的可行性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness as zero-shot time series (TS) forecasters. The key challenge lies in tokenizing TS data into textual representations that align with LLMs' pre-trained knowledge. While existing work often relies on fine-tuning specialized modules to bridge this gap, a distinct, yet challenging, paradigm aims to leverage truly off-the-shelf LLMs without any fine-tuning whatsoever, relying solely on strategic tokenization of numerical sequences. The performance of these fully frozen models is acutely sensitive to the textual representation of the input data, as their parameters cannot adapt to distribution shifts. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet highly effective strategy to overcome this brittleness: injecting noise into the raw time series before tokenization. This non-invasive intervention acts as a form of inference-time augmentation, compelling the frozen LLM to extrapolate based on robust underlying temporal patterns rather than superficial numerical artifacts. We theoretically analyze this phenomenon and empirically validate its effectiveness across diverse benchmarks. Notably, to fully eliminate potential biases from data contamination during LLM pre-training, we introduce two novel TS datasets that fall outside all utilized LLMs' pre-training scopes, and consistently observe improved performance. This study provides a further step in directly leveraging off-the-shelf LLMs for time series forecasting.
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