Investigating Compositional Reasoning in Time Series Foundation Models
Large pre-trained time series foundation models (TSFMs) have demonstrated promising zero-shot performance across a wide range of domains. However, a question remains: Do TSFMs succeed solely by memorizing training patterns, or do they possess the ability to reason? While reasoning is a topic of great interest in the study of Large Language Models (LLMs), it is undefined and largely unexplored in the context of TSFMs. In this work, inspired by language modeling literature, we formally define compositional reasoning in forecasting and distinguish it from in-distribution generalization. We evaluate the reasoning and generalization capabilities of 23 popular deep learning forecasting models on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets. Additionally, through controlled studies, we systematically examine which design choices in TSFMs contribute to improved reasoning abilities. Our study yields key insights into the impact of TSFM architecture design on compositional reasoning and generalization. We find that patch-based Transformers have the best reasoning performance, closely followed by residualized MLP-based architectures, which are 97\% less computationally complex in terms of FLOPs and 86\% smaller in terms of the number of trainable parameters. Interestingly, in some zero-shot out-of-distribution scenarios, these models can outperform moving average and exponential smoothing statistical baselines trained on in-distribution data. Only a few design choices, such as the tokenization method, had a significant (negative) impact on Transformer model performance.
Code (1)
Tasks
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingTime SeriesMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Beyond Forecasting: Compositional Time Series Reasoning for End-to-End Task Execution
In recent decades, there has been substantial advances in time series models and benchmarks across various individual tasks, such as time series forecasting, classification, and anomaly detection. Meanwhile, compositiona…
Anomaly DetectionDecision MakingLarge Language ModelQuestion Answering+2Investigating the Role of Prior Disambiguation in Deep-learning Compositional Models of Meaning
This paper aims to explore the effect of prior disambiguation on neural network- based compositional models, with the hope that better semantic representations for text compounds can be produced. We disambiguate the inpu…
Investigating the interaction of linguistic and mathematical reasoning in language models using multilingual number puzzles
Across languages, numeral systems vary widely in how they construct and combine numbers. While humans consistently learn to navigate this diversity, large language models (LLMs) struggle with linguistic-mathematical puzz…
DiversityMathematical ReasoningNavigateEvaluating Temporal Plasticity in Foundation Time Series Models for Incremental Fine-tuning
Time series foundation models excel at diverse time series forecasting tasks, but their capacity for continuous improvement through incremental learning remains unexplored. We present the first comprehensive study invest…
Continual LearningIncremental LearningTime SeriesTime Series ForecastingLaying the Foundation First? Investigating the Generalization from Atomic Skills to Complex Reasoning Tasks
Current language models have demonstrated their capability to develop basic reasoning, but struggle in more complicated reasoning tasks that require a combination of atomic skills, such as math word problem requiring ski…
MathSkill Generalization