UniCA: Unified Covariate Adaptation for Time Series Foundation Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Han, Lu, Liu, Yu, Li, Lan, Deng, Qiwen, Jiang, Jian, Sun, Yinbo, Yu, Zhe, Wang, Binfeng, Lu, Xingyu, Ma, Lintao, Ye, Han-Jia, Zhan, De-Chuan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Han, Lu
Liu, Yu
Li, Lan
Deng, Qiwen
Jiang, Jian
Sun, Yinbo
Yu, Zhe
Wang, Binfeng
Lu, Xingyu
Ma, Lintao
Ye, Han-Jia
Zhan, De-Chuan
author_facet Han, Lu
Liu, Yu
Li, Lan
Deng, Qiwen
Jiang, Jian
Sun, Yinbo
Yu, Zhe
Wang, Binfeng
Lu, Xingyu
Ma, Lintao
Ye, Han-Jia
Zhan, De-Chuan
contents Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have achieved remarkable success through large-scale pretraining. However, their design primarily targets real-valued series, limiting their ability to handle general forecasting tasks involving diverse and often heterogeneous covariates -- such as categorical variables and multimodal data (e.g., images, text) -- which are typically task-specific and difficult to leverage during pretraining. To address this gap, we propose Unified Covariate Adaptation (UniCA), a framework to bridge TSFMs with general covariate-aware forecasting. UniCA first performs covariate homogenization to transform heterogeneous covariates into high-level homogeneous series representations and then fuses them via a unified attention-based fusion mechanism. UniCA is compatible and universal for adaptation with both homogeneous and heterogeneous covariates, incorporating extra covariate information while preserving the generalization ability of TSFMs.Extensive experiments on multiple unimodal and multimodal covariate-aware forecasting benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of UniCA, highlighting the promise of covariate-aware TSFM adaptation in real-world forecasting scenarios.Code: https://github.com/hanlu-nju/UniCA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_22039
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniCA: Unified Covariate Adaptation for Time Series Foundation Model
Han, Lu
Liu, Yu
Li, Lan
Deng, Qiwen
Jiang, Jian
Sun, Yinbo
Yu, Zhe
Wang, Binfeng
Lu, Xingyu
Ma, Lintao
Ye, Han-Jia
Zhan, De-Chuan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have achieved remarkable success through large-scale pretraining. However, their design primarily targets real-valued series, limiting their ability to handle general forecasting tasks involving diverse and often heterogeneous covariates -- such as categorical variables and multimodal data (e.g., images, text) -- which are typically task-specific and difficult to leverage during pretraining. To address this gap, we propose Unified Covariate Adaptation (UniCA), a framework to bridge TSFMs with general covariate-aware forecasting. UniCA first performs covariate homogenization to transform heterogeneous covariates into high-level homogeneous series representations and then fuses them via a unified attention-based fusion mechanism. UniCA is compatible and universal for adaptation with both homogeneous and heterogeneous covariates, incorporating extra covariate information while preserving the generalization ability of TSFMs.Extensive experiments on multiple unimodal and multimodal covariate-aware forecasting benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of UniCA, highlighting the promise of covariate-aware TSFM adaptation in real-world forecasting scenarios.Code: https://github.com/hanlu-nju/UniCA.
title UniCA: Unified Covariate Adaptation for Time Series Foundation Model
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22039