Less is More: Unlocking Specialization of Time Series Foundation Models via Structured Pruning
Scaling laws motivate the development of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) that pre-train vast parameters and achieve remarkable zero-shot forecasting performance. Surprisingly, even after fine-tuning, TSFMs cannot consistently outperform smaller, specialized models trained on full-shot downstream data. A key question is how to realize effective adaptation of TSFMs for a target forecasting task. Through empirical studies on various TSFMs, the pre-trained models often exhibit inherent sparsity and redundancy in computation, suggesting that TSFMs have learned to activate task-relevant network substructures to accommodate diverse forecasting tasks. To preserve this valuable prior knowledge, we propose a structured pruning method to regularize the subsequent fine-tuning process by focusing it on a more relevant and compact parameter space. Extensive experiments on seven TSFMs and six benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning a smaller, pruned TSFM significantly improves forecasting performance compared to fine-tuning original models. This "prune-then-finetune" paradigm often enables TSFMs to achieve state-of-the-art performance and surpass strong specialized baselines.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Time SeriesMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Moirai-MoE: Empowering Time Series Foundation Models with Sparse Mixture of Experts
Time series foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance as zero-shot forecasters. However, achieving effectively unified training on time series remains an open challenge. Existing approaches introduce som…
Mixture-of-ExpertsTime SeriesAME-TS: Anchored Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Forecasting
Time series forecasting models are increasingly scaled through large Transformer backbones, yet most existing approaches process all series through a shared dense computation path despite substantial heterogeneity in tem…
Time Series ForecastingTawa: Automatic Warp Specialization for Modern GPUs with Asynchronous References
Modern GPUs feature specialized hardware units that enable high-performance, asynchronous dataflow execution. However, the conventional SIMT programming model is fundamentally misaligned with this task-parallel hardware,…
Unlocking the Potential of Deep Learning in Peak-Hour Series Forecasting
Unlocking the potential of deep learning in Peak-Hour Series Forecasting (PHSF) remains a critical yet underexplored task in various domains. While state-of-the-art deep learning models excel in regular Time Series Forec…
DecoderTime SeriesTime Series ForecastingUnlocking Strong Supervision: A Data-Centric Study of General-Purpose Audio Pre-Training Methods
Current audio pre-training seeks to learn unified representations for broad audio understanding tasks, but it remains fragmented and is fundamentally bottlenecked by its reliance on weak, noisy, and scale-limited labels.…