Scaling-laws for Large Time-series Models

Scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) have provided useful guidance on how to train ever larger models for predictable performance gains. Time series forecasting shares a similar sequential structure to language, and is amenable to large-scale transformer architectures. Here we show that foundational decoder-only time series transformer models exhibit analogous scaling-behavior to LLMs, while architectural details (aspect ratio and number of heads) have a minimal effect over broad ranges. We assemble a large corpus of heterogenous time series data on which to train, and establish, for the first time, power-law scaling relations with respect to parameter count, dataset size, and training compute, spanning five orders of magnitude.

Tiny Time Mixers : Fast Pre-trained Models for Enhanced Zero/Few-Shot Forecasting of Multivariate Time Series

Large pre-trained models for zero/few-shot learning excel in language and vision domains but encounter challenges in multivariate time series (TS) due to the diverse nature and scarcity of publicly available pre-training data. Consequently, there has been a recent surge in utilizing pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with token adaptations for TS forecasting. These approaches employ cross-domain transfer learning and surprisingly yield impressive results. However, these models are typically very slow and large (~billion parameters) and do not consider cross-channel correlations. To address this, we present Tiny Time Mixers (TTM), a significantly small model based on the lightweight TSMixer architecture. TTM marks the first success in developing fast and tiny general pre-trained models (<1M parameters), exclusively trained on public TS datasets, with effective transfer learning capabilities for forecasting. To tackle the complexity of pre-training on multiple datasets with varied temporal resolutions, we introduce several novel enhancements such as adaptive patching, dataset augmentation via downsampling, and resolution prefix tuning. Moreover, we employ a multi-level modeling strategy to effectively model channel correlations and infuse exogenous signals during fine-tuning, a crucial capability lacking in existing benchmarks. TTM shows significant accuracy gains (12-38\%) over popular benchmarks in few/zero-shot forecasting. It also drastically reduces the compute needs as compared to LLM-TS methods, with a 14X cut in learnable parameters, 106X less total parameters, and substantial reductions in fine-tuning (65X) and inference time (54X). In fact, TTM's zero-shot often surpasses the few-shot results in many popular benchmarks, highlighting the efficacy of our approach. Code and pre-trained models will be open-sourced.

AutoMixer for Improved Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting on Business and IT Observability Data

The efficiency of business processes relies on business key performance indicators (Biz-KPIs), that can be negatively impacted by IT failures. Business and IT Observability (BizITObs) data fuses both Biz-KPIs and IT event channels together as multivariate time series data. Forecasting Biz-KPIs in advance can enhance efficiency and revenue through proactive corrective measures. However, BizITObs data generally exhibit both useful and noisy inter-channel interactions between Biz-KPIs and IT events that need to be effectively decoupled. This leads to suboptimal forecasting performance when existing multivariate forecasting models are employed. To address this, we introduce AutoMixer, a time-series Foundation Model (FM) approach, grounded on the novel technique of channel-compressed pretrain and finetune workflows. AutoMixer leverages an AutoEncoder for channel-compressed pretraining and integrates it with the advanced TSMixer model for multivariate time series forecasting. This fusion greatly enhances the potency of TSMixer for accurate forecasts and also generalizes well across several downstream tasks. Through detailed experiments and dashboard analytics, we show AutoMixer's capability to consistently improve the Biz-KPI's forecasting accuracy (by 11-15\%) which directly translates to actionable business insights.

ST-MLP: A Cascaded Spatio-Temporal Linear Framework with Channel-Independence Strategy for Traffic Forecasting

The criticality of prompt and precise traffic forecasting in optimizing traffic flow management in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has drawn substantial scholarly focus. Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have been lauded for their adaptability to road graph structures. Yet, current research on STGNNs architectures often prioritizes complex designs, leading to elevated computational burdens with only minor enhancements in accuracy. To address this issue, we propose ST-MLP, a concise spatio-temporal model solely based on cascaded Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) modules and linear layers. Specifically, we incorporate temporal information, spatial information and predefined graph structure with a successful implementation of the channel-independence strategy - an effective technique in time series forecasting. Empirical results demonstrate that ST-MLP outperforms state-of-the-art STGNNs and other models in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. Our finding encourages further exploration of more concise and effective neural network architectures in the field of traffic forecasting.

A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers

We propose an efficient design of Transformer-based models for multivariate time series forecasting and self-supervised representation learning. It is based on two key components: (i) segmentation of time series into subseries-level patches which are served as input tokens to Transformer; (ii) channel-independence where each channel contains a single univariate time series that shares the same embedding and Transformer weights across all the series. Patching design naturally has three-fold benefit: local semantic information is retained in the embedding; computation and memory usage of the attention maps are quadratically reduced given the same look-back window; and the model can attend longer history. Our channel-independent patch time series Transformer (PatchTST) can improve the long-term forecasting accuracy significantly when compared with that of SOTA Transformer-based models. We also apply our model to self-supervised pre-training tasks and attain excellent fine-tuning performance, which outperforms supervised training on large datasets. Transferring of masked pre-trained representation on one dataset to others also produces SOTA forecasting accuracy. Code is available at: https://github.com/yuqinie98/PatchTST.

A Strong Baseline for Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle Re-Identification (Re-ID) aims to identify the same vehicle across different cameras, hence plays an important role in modern traffic management systems. The technical challenges require the algorithms must be robust in different views, resolution, occlusion and illumination conditions. In this paper, we first analyze the main factors hindering the Vehicle Re-ID performance. We then present our solutions, specifically targeting the dataset Track 2 of the 5th AI City Challenge, including (1) reducing the domain gap between real and synthetic data, (2) network modification by stacking multi heads with attention mechanism, (3) adaptive loss weight adjustment. Our method achieves 61.34% mAP on the private CityFlow testset without using external dataset or pseudo labeling, and outperforms all previous works at 87.1% mAP on the Veri benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/cybercore-co-ltd/track2_aicity_2021.

Experimental evaluation of quantum Bayesian networks on IBM QX hardware

Bayesian Networks (BN) are probabilistic graphical models that are widely used for uncertainty modeling, stochastic prediction and probabilistic inference. A Quantum Bayesian Network (QBN) is a quantum version of the Bayesian network that utilizes the principles of quantum mechanical systems to improve the computational performance of various analyses. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the performance of QBN on various IBM QX hardware against Qiskit simulator and classical analysis. We consider a 4-node BN for stock prediction for our experimental evaluation. We construct a quantum circuit to represent the 4-node BN using Qiskit, and run the circuit on nine IBM quantum devices: Yorktown, Vigo, Ourense, Essex, Burlington, London, Rome, Athens and Melbourne. We will also compare the performance of each device across the four levels of optimization performed by the IBM Transpiler when mapping a given quantum circuit to a given device. We use the root mean square percentage error as the metric for performance comparison of various hardware.

A Scale Invariant Flatness Measure for Deep Network Minima

It has been empirically observed that the flatness of minima obtained from training deep networks seems to correlate with better generalization. However, for deep networks with positively homogeneous activations, most measures of sharpness/flatness are not invariant to rescaling of the network parameters, corresponding to the same function. This means that the measure of flatness/sharpness can be made as small or as large as possible through rescaling, rendering the quantitative measures meaningless. In this paper we show that for deep networks with positively homogenous activations, these rescalings constitute equivalence relations, and that these equivalence relations induce a quotient manifold structure in the parameter space. Using this manifold structure and an appropriate metric, we propose a Hessian-based measure for flatness that is invariant to rescaling. We use this new measure to confirm the proposition that Large-Batch SGD minima are indeed sharper than Small-Batch SGD minima.

When Does Stochastic Gradient Algorithm Work Well?

In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a fixed, large step size and propose a novel assumption on the objective function, under which this method has the improved convergence rates (to a neighborhood of the optimal solutions). We then empirically demonstrate that these assumptions hold for logistic regression and standard deep neural networks on classical data sets. Thus our analysis helps to explain when efficient behavior can be expected from the SGD method in training classification models and deep neural networks.

Collaborative Multi-sensor Classification via Sparsity-based Representation

In this paper, we propose a general collaborative sparse representation framework for multi-sensor classification, which takes into account the correlations as well as complementary information between heterogeneous sensors simultaneously while considering joint sparsity within each sensor's observations. We also robustify our models to deal with the presence of sparse noise and low-rank interference signals. Specifically, we demonstrate that incorporating the noise or interference signal as a low-rank component in our models is essential in a multi-sensor classification problem when multiple co-located sources/sensors simultaneously record the same physical event. We further extend our frameworks to kernelized models which rely on sparsely representing a test sample in terms of all the training samples in a feature space induced by a kernel function. A fast and efficient algorithm based on alternative direction method is proposed where its convergence to an optimal solution is guaranteed. Extensive experiments are conducted on several real multi-sensor data sets and results are compared with the conventional classifiers to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.