PatchFormer: A Patch-Based Time Series Foundation Model with Hierarchical Masked Reconstruction and Cross-Domain Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Multi-Horizon Forecasting

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Imanov, Olaf Yunus Laitinen, Kulali, Derya Umut, Yilmaz, Taner
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914287476277248
author Imanov, Olaf Yunus Laitinen
Kulali, Derya Umut
Yilmaz, Taner
author_facet Imanov, Olaf Yunus Laitinen
Kulali, Derya Umut
Yilmaz, Taner
contents Time series forecasting is a fundamental problem with applications in climate, energy, healthcare, and finance. Many existing approaches require domain-specific feature engineering and substantial labeled data for each task. We introduce PatchFormer, a patch-based time series foundation model that uses hierarchical masked reconstruction for self-supervised pretraining and lightweight adapters for efficient transfer. PatchFormer segments time series into patches and learns multiscale temporal representations with learnable aggregation across temporal scales. Pretraining uses masked patch reconstruction with dynamic masking and objectives that encourage both local accuracy and global consistency, followed by cross-domain knowledge distillation. Experiments on 24 benchmark datasets spanning weather, energy, traffic, finance, and healthcare demonstrate state-of-the-art zero-shot multi-horizon forecasting, reducing mean squared error by 27.3 percent relative to strong baselines while requiring 94 percent less task-specific training data. The model exhibits near log-linear scaling with more pretraining data up to 100 billion points and processes length-512 sequences 3.8x faster than full-sequence transformers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_20845
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PatchFormer: A Patch-Based Time Series Foundation Model with Hierarchical Masked Reconstruction and Cross-Domain Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Multi-Horizon Forecasting
Imanov, Olaf Yunus Laitinen
Kulali, Derya Umut
Yilmaz, Taner
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
62M10, 68T07
G.3; I.2.6; I.5.1
Time series forecasting is a fundamental problem with applications in climate, energy, healthcare, and finance. Many existing approaches require domain-specific feature engineering and substantial labeled data for each task. We introduce PatchFormer, a patch-based time series foundation model that uses hierarchical masked reconstruction for self-supervised pretraining and lightweight adapters for efficient transfer. PatchFormer segments time series into patches and learns multiscale temporal representations with learnable aggregation across temporal scales. Pretraining uses masked patch reconstruction with dynamic masking and objectives that encourage both local accuracy and global consistency, followed by cross-domain knowledge distillation. Experiments on 24 benchmark datasets spanning weather, energy, traffic, finance, and healthcare demonstrate state-of-the-art zero-shot multi-horizon forecasting, reducing mean squared error by 27.3 percent relative to strong baselines while requiring 94 percent less task-specific training data. The model exhibits near log-linear scaling with more pretraining data up to 100 billion points and processes length-512 sequences 3.8x faster than full-sequence transformers.
title PatchFormer: A Patch-Based Time Series Foundation Model with Hierarchical Masked Reconstruction and Cross-Domain Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Multi-Horizon Forecasting
topic Machine Learning
Signal Processing
62M10, 68T07
G.3; I.2.6; I.5.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20845