SSDA: Bridging Spectral and Structural Gaps via Dual Adaptation for Vision-Based Time Series Forecasting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Mingrui, Yang, Hanchen, Li, Wengen, Jiang, Xudong, Zhang, Yichao, Guan, Jihong, Zhou, Shuigeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Mingrui
Yang, Hanchen
Li, Wengen
Jiang, Xudong
Zhang, Yichao
Guan, Jihong
Zhou, Shuigeng
author_facet Zhang, Mingrui
Yang, Hanchen
Li, Wengen
Jiang, Xudong
Zhang, Yichao
Guan, Jihong
Zhou, Shuigeng
contents Large vision models (LVMs) have recently proven to be surprisingly effective time series forecasters, simply by rendering temporal data as images. This success, how ever, rests on a largely unexamined premise: the rendered time series images are sufficiently close to natural images for knowledge in pre-trained models to transfer effectively. We argue that two gaps still remain, i.e., spectral and structural gaps, fundamentally limiting the potential of LVMs for time series forecasting. Spectrally, we systematically reveal that rendered time series images exhibit a markedly shallower power spectrum than the natural images LVMs are pre-trained to recognize. Structurally, reshaping 1D temporal sequences into 2D grids fabricates spurious spatial adjacencies while severing genuine temporal continuities, misleading the spatial inductive biases of pre-trained LVMs. To bridge these gaps, we propose SSDA, a dual-branch network that spectrally and structurally adapts to unlock the full potential of LVMs for time series forecasting. At the data level, a Spectral Magnitude Aligner (SMA) applies 2D FFT to selectively enhance the magnitude spectrum toward natural-image statistics while preserving phase. At the model level, a Structural-Guided Low-Rank Adaptation (SG-LoRA) injects position-aware temporal encodings into patch embeddings and adapts at tention via low-rank updates. The two branches are further adaptively fused to produce the final forecast. Extensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SSDA consistently outperforms strong LVM- and LLM-based baselines under both full-shot and few-shot settings. Code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SSDA-8C5B.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12550
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SSDA: Bridging Spectral and Structural Gaps via Dual Adaptation for Vision-Based Time Series Forecasting
Zhang, Mingrui
Yang, Hanchen
Li, Wengen
Jiang, Xudong
Zhang, Yichao
Guan, Jihong
Zhou, Shuigeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Large vision models (LVMs) have recently proven to be surprisingly effective time series forecasters, simply by rendering temporal data as images. This success, how ever, rests on a largely unexamined premise: the rendered time series images are sufficiently close to natural images for knowledge in pre-trained models to transfer effectively. We argue that two gaps still remain, i.e., spectral and structural gaps, fundamentally limiting the potential of LVMs for time series forecasting. Spectrally, we systematically reveal that rendered time series images exhibit a markedly shallower power spectrum than the natural images LVMs are pre-trained to recognize. Structurally, reshaping 1D temporal sequences into 2D grids fabricates spurious spatial adjacencies while severing genuine temporal continuities, misleading the spatial inductive biases of pre-trained LVMs. To bridge these gaps, we propose SSDA, a dual-branch network that spectrally and structurally adapts to unlock the full potential of LVMs for time series forecasting. At the data level, a Spectral Magnitude Aligner (SMA) applies 2D FFT to selectively enhance the magnitude spectrum toward natural-image statistics while preserving phase. At the model level, a Structural-Guided Low-Rank Adaptation (SG-LoRA) injects position-aware temporal encodings into patch embeddings and adapts at tention via low-rank updates. The two branches are further adaptively fused to produce the final forecast. Extensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SSDA consistently outperforms strong LVM- and LLM-based baselines under both full-shot and few-shot settings. Code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SSDA-8C5B.
title SSDA: Bridging Spectral and Structural Gaps via Dual Adaptation for Vision-Based Time Series Forecasting
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12550