Lightweight Online Adaption for Time Series Foundation Model Forecasts

Thomas L Lee, William Toner, Rajkarn Singh, Artjom Joosen, Martin Asenov

Keywords: Time Series, Online Adaptation, Foundation Models

TL;DR: We propose ELF a model-agnostic and efficient method to improve the forecasts of time series foundation models at deployment by using online feedback.

Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as a promising approach for time series forecasting. While effective, FMs typically remain fixed during deployment due to the high computational costs of learning them online. Consequently, deployed FMs fail to adapt their forecasts to current data characteristics, despite the availability of online feedback from newly arriving data. This raises the question of whether FM performance can be enhanced by the \textit{efficient} usage of this feedback. We propose *ELF* to answer this question. ELF is a lightweight mechanism for the online adaption of FM forecasts in response to online feedback. ELF consists of two parts: **a)** the *ELF-Forecaster* which is used to learn the current data distribution; and **b)** the *ELF-Weighter* which is used to combine the forecasts of the FM and the ELF-Forecaster. We evaluate the performance of ELF in conjunction with several recent FMs across a suite of standard time series datasets. In *all* of our experiments we find that using ELF improves performance. This work demonstrates how efficient usage of online feedback can be used to improve FM forecasts.

Submission Number: 2