Zhaoyang Zhu

Dalin Qin, Yehui Li, Weiqi Chen et al.

Complex distribution shifts are the main obstacle to achieving accurate long-term time series forecasting. Several efforts have been conducted to capture the distribution characteristics and propose adaptive normalization techniques to alleviate the influence of distribution shifts. However, these methods neglect the intricate distribution dynamics observed from various scales and the evolving functions of distribution dynamics and normalized mapping relationships. To this end, we propose a novel model-agnostic Evolving Multi-Scale Normalization (EvoMSN) framework to tackle the distribution shift problem. Flexible normalization and denormalization are proposed based on the multi-scale statistics prediction module and adaptive ensembling. An evolving optimization strategy is designed to update the forecasting model and statistics prediction module collaboratively to track the shifting distributions. We evaluate the effectiveness of EvoMSN in improving the performance of five mainstream forecasting methods on benchmark datasets and also show its superiority compared to existing advanced normalization and online learning approaches. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/qindalin/EvoMSN.

Siqiao Xue, Zhaoyang Zhu, Wei Zhang et al.

Time series forecasting is critical across finance, healthcare, and cloud computing, yet progress is constrained by a fundamental bottleneck: the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce \textsc{QuitoBench}, a regime-balanced benchmark for time series forecasting with coverage across eight trend$\times$seasonality$\times$forecastability (TSF) regimes, designed to capture forecasting-relevant properties rather than application-defined domain labels. The benchmark is built upon \textsc{Quito}, a billion-scale time series corpus of application traffic from Alipay spanning nine business domains. Benchmarking 10 models from deep learning, foundation models, and statistical baselines across 232,200 evaluation instances, we report four key findings: (i) a context-length crossover where deep learning models lead at short context ($L=96$) but foundation models dominate at long context ($L \ge 576$); (ii) forecastability is the dominant difficulty driver, producing a $3.64 \times$ MAE gap across regimes; (iii) deep learning models match or surpass foundation models at $59 \times$ fewer parameters; and (iv) scaling the amount of training data provides substantially greater benefit than scaling model size for both model families. These findings are validated by strong cross-benchmark and cross-metric consistency. Our open-source release enables reproducible, regime-aware evaluation for time series forecasting research.

Linxiao Yang, Xue Jiang, Gezheng Xu et al.

Transformers enable in-context learning (ICL) for rapid, gradient-free adaptation in time series forecasting, yet most ICL-style approaches rely on tabularized, hand-crafted features, while end-to-end sequence models lack inference-time adaptation. We bridge this gap with a unified framework, Baguan-TS, which integrates the raw-sequence representation learning with ICL, instantiated by a 3D Transformer that attends jointly over temporal, variable, and context axes. To make this high-capacity model practical, we tackle two key hurdles: (i) calibration and training stability, improved with a feature-agnostic, target-space retrieval-based local calibration; and (ii) output oversmoothing, mitigated via context-overfitting strategy. On public benchmark with covariates, Baguan-TS consistently outperforms established baselines, achieving the highest win rate and significant reductions in both point and probabilistic forecasting metrics. Further evaluations across diverse real-world energy datasets demonstrate its robustness, yielding substantial improvements.

Zhaoyang Zhu, Haozhe Sun, Chi Zhang

Adam is applied widely to train neural networks. Different kinds of Adam methods with different features pop out. Recently two new adam optimizers, AdaBelief and Padam are introduced among the community. We analyze these two adam optimizers and compare them with other conventional optimizers (Adam, SGD + Momentum) in the scenario of image classification. We evaluate the performance of these optimization algorithms on AlexNet and simplified versions of VGGNet, ResNet using the EMNIST dataset. (Benchmark algorithm is available at \hyperref[https://github.com/chuiyunjun/projectCSC413]{https://github.com/chuiyunjun/projectCSC413}).

YiFan Zhang, Weiqi Chen, Zhaoyang Zhu et al.

Online updating of time series forecasting models aims to tackle the challenge of concept drifting by adjusting forecasting models based on streaming data. While numerous algorithms have been developed, most of them focus on model design and updating. In practice, many of these methods struggle with continuous performance regression in the face of accumulated concept drifts over time. To address this limitation, we present a novel approach, Concept \textbf{D}rift \textbf{D}etection an\textbf{D} \textbf{A}daptation (D3A), that first detects drifting conception and then aggressively adapts the current model to the drifted concepts after the detection for rapid adaption. To best harness the utility of historical data for model adaptation, we propose a data augmentation strategy introducing Gaussian noise into existing training instances. It helps mitigate the data distribution gap, a critical factor contributing to train-test performance inconsistency. The significance of our data augmentation process is verified by our theoretical analysis. Our empirical studies across six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of D3A in improving model adaptation capability. Notably, compared to a simple Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) baseline, D3A reduces the average Mean Squared Error (MSE) by $43.9\%$. For the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, the MSE is reduced by $33.3\%$.

Zhaoyang Zhu, Zhipeng Zeng, Qiming Chen et al.

Electric load forecasting is pivotal for power system operation, planning and decision-making. The rise of smart grids and meters has provided more detailed and high-quality load data at multiple levels of granularity, from home to bus and cities. Motivated by similar patterns of loads across different cities in a province in eastern China, in this paper we focus on the Multi-Region Electric Load Forecasting (MRELF) problem, targeting accurate short-term load forecasting for multiple sub-regions within a large region. We identify three challenges for MRELF, including regional variation, contextual variation, and temporal variation. To address them, we propose TriForecaster, a new framework leveraging the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach within a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) paradigm to overcome these challenges. TriForecaster features RegionMixer and Context-Time Specializer (CTSpecializer) layers, enabling dynamic cooperation and specialization of expert models across regional, contextual, and temporal dimensions. Based on evaluation on four real-world MRELF datasets with varied granularity, TriForecaster outperforms state-of-the-art models by achieving an average forecast error reduction of 22.4\%, thereby demonstrating its flexibility and broad applicability. In particular, the deployment of TriForecaster on the eForecaster platform in eastern China exemplifies its practical utility, effectively providing city-level, short-term load forecasts for 17 cities, supporting a population exceeding 110 million and daily electricity usage over 100 gigawatt-hours.

Yueze Liu, Yichi Zhang, Shaan Om Patel et al.

Modern conversational agents, including anime-themed chatbots, are frequently reactive and personality-driven but fail to capture the dynamic nature of human interactions. We propose an event-driven dialogue framework to address these limitations by embedding dynamic events in conversation prompts and fine-tuning models on character-specific data. Evaluations on GPT-4 and comparisons with industry-leading baselines demonstrate that event-driven prompts significantly improve conversational engagement and naturalness while reducing hallucinations. This paper explores the application of this approach in creating lifelike chatbot interactions within the context of Honkai: Star Rail, showcasing the potential for dynamic event-based systems to transform role-playing and interactive dialogue.