U-Former ODE: Fast Probabilistic Forecasting of Irregular Time Series

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kuleshov, Ilya, Marusov, Alexander, Zaytsev, Alexey
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kuleshov, Ilya
Marusov, Alexander
Zaytsev, Alexey
author_facet Kuleshov, Ilya
Marusov, Alexander
Zaytsev, Alexey
contents Probabilistic forecasting of irregularly sampled time series is crucial in domains such as healthcare and finance, yet it remains a formidable challenge. Existing Neural Controlled Differential Equation (Neural CDE) approaches, while effective at modelling continuous dynamics, suffer from slow, inherently sequential computation, which restricts scalability and limits access to global context. We introduce UFO (U-Former ODE), a novel architecture that seamlessly integrates the parallelizable, multiscale feature extraction of U-Nets, the powerful global modelling of Transformers, and the continuous-time dynamics of Neural CDEs. By constructing a fully causal, parallelizable model, UFO achieves a global receptive field while retaining strong sensitivity to local temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on five standard benchmarks -- covering both regularly and irregularly sampled time series -- demonstrate that UFO consistently outperforms ten state-of-the-art neural baselines in predictive accuracy. Moreover, UFO delivers up to 15$\times$ faster inference compared to conventional Neural CDEs, with consistently strong performance on long and highly multivariate sequences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_11738
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle U-Former ODE: Fast Probabilistic Forecasting of Irregular Time Series
Kuleshov, Ilya
Marusov, Alexander
Zaytsev, Alexey
Machine Learning
Probabilistic forecasting of irregularly sampled time series is crucial in domains such as healthcare and finance, yet it remains a formidable challenge. Existing Neural Controlled Differential Equation (Neural CDE) approaches, while effective at modelling continuous dynamics, suffer from slow, inherently sequential computation, which restricts scalability and limits access to global context. We introduce UFO (U-Former ODE), a novel architecture that seamlessly integrates the parallelizable, multiscale feature extraction of U-Nets, the powerful global modelling of Transformers, and the continuous-time dynamics of Neural CDEs. By constructing a fully causal, parallelizable model, UFO achieves a global receptive field while retaining strong sensitivity to local temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on five standard benchmarks -- covering both regularly and irregularly sampled time series -- demonstrate that UFO consistently outperforms ten state-of-the-art neural baselines in predictive accuracy. Moreover, UFO delivers up to 15$\times$ faster inference compared to conventional Neural CDEs, with consistently strong performance on long and highly multivariate sequences.
title U-Former ODE: Fast Probabilistic Forecasting of Irregular Time Series
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11738