FAiT: Frequency-Aware Inverted Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

While Transformer-based architectures have established themselves as a dominant paradigm in Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF), their core self-attention mechanism inherently functions as a low-pass filter, systematically smoothing out high-frequency signals vital for sharp local changes. Recent advancements have increasingly incorporated frequency-domain operations to address this bias, however, most existing designs rely on fixed spectral bases and apply sequence-wise (uniform) modulation, implicitly assuming a time-invariant frequency response. This overlooks a key property of real-world series that their spectral characteristics often evolve over time, making uniform modulation insufficient for capturing fine-grained temporal dynamics. To tackle these limitations, we propose FAiT, a Frequency-Aware inverted Transformer. Specifically, FAiT rectifies the spectral bias internally through Inverted Attention, which interprets the attention map as a learnable low-pass operator and constructs a dedicated complementary high-pass branch by inverting the attention matrix to recover attenuated transient signals. Furthermore, FAiT introduces Dynamic Temporal-Frequency Modulation (DTFM), which synthesizes instance-conditioned weights to adaptively re-calibrate the energy of spectral sub-bands, enabling fine-grained control over evolving multi-scale patterns. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that FAiT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art Transformer-based and frequency-enhanced baselines, while maintaining computational efficiency.