forecasting
Relational and Sequential Conformal Inference for Energy Time Series over Graphs via Foundation Models
Niresi, Keivan Faghih, Cicirello, Alice, Fink, Olga
Accurate energy demand forecasting is essential for the reliable operation and planning of modern sustainable energy systems. Spatial-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) have recently achieved strong performance in point forecasting by jointly modeling temporal dynamics and relational dependencies across interconnected energy nodes. However, in real-world energy systems, accurate point forecasts alone are insufficient, as operators also require reliable uncertainty estimates to support risk-aware decision-making, grid stability, and operational planning under uncertainty. Conformal prediction provides a principled and model-agnostic framework for uncertainty quantification with statistical coverage guarantees, making it particularly attractive for safety-critical energy applications. However, existing conformal prediction approaches often fail to fully capture the complex spatial-temporal structure of energy systems. To address these limitations, we propose STOIC (Spatial-Temporal Graph Conformal Prediction with In-Context Learning), a novel framework that integrates graph-based forecasting with the zero-shot calibration capabilities of tabular foundation models. STOIC first generates point forecasts using an STGNN and subsequently reformulates spatial-temporal residuals into a tabular representation suitable for in-context learning. Leveraging a tabular foundation model, STOIC calibrates prediction intervals without task-specific retraining, effectively capturing both sequential and relational dependencies. We evaluate STOIC on five diverse benchmarks, including synthetic simulations as well as real-world electricity and district heating networks. Across all datasets, STOIC consistently outperforms existing conformal prediction baselines, delivering more reliable and robust uncertainty estimates for complex graph-structured energy time series.
Data-Driven Duration Management -- Term Structure Forecasting Using Machine Learning
Lausser, Tobias, Vuolo, Joao Eduardo, Zagst, Rudi
This paper compares different methods for forecasting the term structure of U.S. and European zero-coupon government bonds using both traditional econometric and Machine Learning (ML) approaches. We compare classical models (e.g., Dynamic Nelson-Siegel (DNS) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA)) with different Neural Network (NN) architectures, including those inspired by the classical models, on the U.S. Treasury market and bonds issued by the European Central Bank (ECB). To enhance predictive performance, macroeconomic variables are incorporated. The findings for both markets are separately analyzed and compared. To this end, we propose a robust model evaluation framework combining statistical accuracy metrics - such as RMSE, MAE, and directional accuracy - with the economic relevance of a quantitative bond trading strategy. Results show that NNs consistently outperform traditional models in both forecasting accuracy and portfolio performance. For the U.S., the most effective approach is a direct-forecasting NN that incorporates DNS factors to reduce the dimensionality of zero-rate data and an Autoencoder (AE) to extract macroeconomic features, while for Europe, the optimal model is a factor-based NN using PCA-derived zero-rate factors without the integration of macroeconomic variables. Overall, the paper demonstrates how combining traditional modeling approaches with modern ML techniques and evaluation can improve yield curve forecasts and support applications in fixed-income portfolio construction.
FlowNet Modeling Dynamic Temporal Systems via Flow Propagation
Accurately modeling complex dynamic spatio-temporal systems requires capturing flow-mediated interdependencies and context-sensitive interaction dynamics. Existing methods, predominantly graph-based or attention-driven, rely on similaritydriven connectivity assumptions, neglecting asymmetric flow exchanges that govern system evolution. We propose Spatio-Temporal Flow, a physics-inspired paradigm that explicitly models dynamic node couplings through quantifiable flow transfers governed by conservation principles. Building on this, we design FlowNet, a novel architecture leveraging flow tokens as information carriers to simulate source-todestination transfers via Flow Allocation Modules, ensuring state redistribution aligns with conservation laws. FlowNet dynamically adjusts the interaction radius through an Adaptive Spatial Masking module, suppressing irrelevant noise while enabling context-aware propagation. A cascaded architecture enhances scalability and nonlinear representation capacity. Experiments demonstrate that FlowNet significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on seven metrics in the modeling of three real-world systems, validating its efficiency and physical interpretability. We establish a principled methodology for modeling complex systems through spatio-temporal flow interactions.
7813e19a86fd73d40f7e811ab15f6d5f-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf
Long-separated research has been conducted on two highly correlated tracks: traffic and incidents. Traffic track witnesses complicating deep learning models, e.g., to push the prediction a few percent more accurate, and the incident track only studies the incidents alone, e.g., to infer the incident risk. We, for the first time, spatiotemporally aligned the two tracks in a large-scale region (16,972 traffic nodes) from year 2022 to 2024: our TraffiDent dataset includes traffic, i.e., time-series indexes on traffic flow, lane occupancy, and average vehicle speed, and incident, whose records are spatiotemporally aligned with traffic data, with seven different incident classes. Additionally, each node includes detailed physical and policylevel meta-attributes of lanes. Previous datasets typically contain only traffic or incident data in isolation, limiting research to general forecasting tasks.
FAN Fourier Analysis Networks
Despite the remarkable successes of general-purpose neural networks, such as MLPs and Transformers, we find that they exhibit notable shortcomings in modeling and reasoning about periodic phenomena, achieving only marginal performance within the training domain and failing to generalize effectively to out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios. Periodicity is ubiquitous throughout nature and science. Therefore, neural networks should be equipped with the essential ability to model and handle periodicity. In this work, we propose FAN, a novel neural network that effectively addresses periodicity modeling challenges while offering broad applicability similar to MLP with fewer parameters and FLOPs. Periodicity is naturally integrated into FAN's structure and computational processes by introducing the Fourier Principle. Unlike existing Fourier-based networks, which possess particular periodicity modeling abilities but face challenges in scaling to deeper networks and are typically designed for specific tasks, our approach overcomes this challenge to enable scaling to large-scale models and maintains the capability to be applied to more types of tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of FAN in periodicity modeling tasks and the effectiveness and generalizability of FAN across a range of real-world tasks. Moreover, we reveal that compared to existing Fourier-based networks, FAN accommodates both periodicity modeling and general-purpose modeling well.
OmniCast: AMasked Latent Diffusion Model for Weather Forecasting Across Time Scales
Accurate weather forecasting across time scales is critical for anticipating and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Recent data-driven methods based on deep learning have achieved significant success in the medium range, but struggle at longer subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) horizons due to error accumulation in their autoregressive approach. In this work, we propose OmniCast, a scalable and skillful probabilistic model that unifies weather forecasting across timescales. OmniCast consists of two components, a VAE model that encodes raw weather data into a continuous, lower-dimensional latent space, and a diffusion-based transformer model that generates a sequence of future latent tokens given the initial conditioning tokens. During training, we mask random future tokens and train the transformer to estimate their distribution given conditioning and visible tokens using a per-token diffusion head. During inference, the transformer generates the full sequence of future tokens by iteratively unmasking random subsets of tokens.
Many Minds, One Goal: Time Series Forecasting via Sub-task Specialization and Inter-agent Cooperation
Time series forecasting is a critical and complex task, characterized by diverse temporal patterns, varying statistical properties, and different prediction horizons across datasets and domains. Conventional approaches typically rely on a single, unified model architecture to handle all forecasting scenarios. However, such monolithic models struggle to generalize across dynamically evolving time series with shifting patterns. In reality, different types of time series may require distinct modeling strategies. Some benefit from homogeneous multi-scale forecasting awareness, while others rely on more complex and heterogeneous signal perception. Relying on a single model to capture all temporal diversity and structural variations leads to limited performance and poor interpretability. To address this challenge, we propose a Multi-Agent Forecasting System (MAFS) that abandons the one-sizefits-all paradigm. MAFS decomposes the forecasting task into multiple sub-tasks, each handled by a dedicated agent trained on specific temporal perspectives (e.g., different forecasting resolutions or signal characteristics). Furthermore, to achieve holistic forecasting, agents share and refine information through different communication topology, enabling cooperative reasoning across different temporal views.
Single-Step Operator Learning for Conditioned Time-Series Diffusion Models
Diffusion models have achieved significant success, yet their application to time series data, particularly with regard to efficient sampling, remains an active area of research. We describe an operator-learning approach for conditioned timeseries diffusion models that gives efficient single-step generation by leveraging insights from the frequency-domain characteristics of both the time-series data and the diffusion process itself. The forward diffusion process induces a structured, frequency-dependent smoothing of the data's probability density function. However, this frequency smoothing is related (e.g., via likelihood function) to easily accessible frequency components of time-series data. This suggests that a module operating in the frequency space of the time-series can, potentially, more effectively learn to reverse the frequency-dependent smoothing of the data distribution induced by the diffusion process. We set up an operator learning task, based on frequency-aware building blocks, which satisfies semigroup properties, while exploiting the structure of time-series data. Evaluations on multiple datasets show that our single-step generation proposal achieves forecasting/imputation results comparable (or superior) to many multi-step diffusion schemes while significantly reducing inference costs.
DINO-Foresight: Looking into the Future with DINO
Predicting future dynamics is crucial for applications like autonomous driving and robotics, where understanding the environment is key. Existing pixel-level methods are computationally expensive and often focus on irrelevant details. To address these challenges, we introduce DINO-Foresight, a novel framework that operates in the semantic feature space of pretrained Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Our approach trains a masked feature transformer in a self-supervised manner to predict the evolution of VFM features over time. By forecasting these features, we can apply off-the-shelf, task-specific heads for various scene understanding tasks. In this framework, VFM features are treated as a latent space, to which different heads attach to perform specific tasks for future-frame analysis. Extensive experiments show the very strong performance, robustness and scalability of our framework.
SEMPO: Lightweight Foundation Models for Time Series Forecasting
Despite impressive performance across diverse downstream forecasting tasks, existing time series FMs possess massive network architectures and require substantial pre-training on large-scale datasets, which significantly hinders their deployment in resourceconstrained environments. In response to this growing tension between versatility and affordability, we propose SEMPO, a novel lightweight foundation model that requires pretraining on relatively small-scale data, yet exhibits strong general time series forecasting. Concretely, SEMPO comprises two key modules: 1) energyaware SpEctral decomposition module, that substantially improves the utilization of pre-training data by modeling not only the high-energy frequency signals but also the low-energy yet informative frequency signals that are ignored in current methods; and 2) Mixture-of-PrOmpts enabled Transformer, that learns heterogeneous temporal patterns through small dataset-specific prompts and adaptively routes time series tokens to prompt-based experts for parameter-efficient model adaptation across different datasets and domains. Equipped with these modules, SEMPO significantly reduces both pre-training data scale and model size, while achieving strong generalization. Extensive experiments on two large-scale benchmarks covering 16 datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SEMPO in both zero-shot and few-shot forecasting scenarios compared with state-of-the-art methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/mala-lab/SEMPO.