Beyond Extrapolation: Knowledge Utilization Paradigm with Bidirectional Inspiration for Time Series Forecasting
For time-series forecasting practitioners, this work offers a plug-and-play module that enhances existing models by leveraging structural knowledge from training data, though the improvement is incremental rather than a breakthrough.
This paper introduces KUP-BI, a new time-series forecasting paradigm that distills continuation-style knowledge from a training-only historical library to provide an approximate post-target continuation proxy, which is fused with the input stream via a lightweight gating module. Experiments on six public datasets show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art models with small additional overhead.
Time-series forecasting is critical in various scenarios, such as energy, transportation, and public health. However, most existing forecasters rely primarily on one-way inference, \textit{i.e.}, mapping \textbf{history} to \textbf{target}, and overlook the structural information provided by a revised natural chain (``\textbf{history} (model input) -- \textbf{target} (ground-truth output) -- \textbf{post-target continuation}''). The post-target continuation records how trajectories evolve after the target, which can help stabilize forecasting, but it is not observable at inference time. In this work, we aim to obtain an approximate proxy of the post-target continuation for the current input, providing structural knowledge for bidirectional forecasting. This idea is instantiated as KUP-BI (Knowledge Utilization Paradigm with Bidirectional Inspiration), a new time-series modeling paradigm that distills continuation-style knowledge (as an approximate post-target continuation proxy) from a \emph{train-only} historical library and integrates it into standard forecasting backbones. The input stream and the continuation-proxy stream are fused via a lightweight feature-level gating module. This design does not introduce information beyond what is already contained in the training trajectories; instead, it provides a structured inductive bias that helps backbones exploit typical continuation patterns rather than relying solely on parametric extrapolation. Experimental results on six public datasets show that KUP-BI consistently improves the forecasting performance of state-of-the-art models, with small additional overhead.