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Vijaya Krishna Yalavarthi

Publications and source records attributed to Vijaya Krishna Yalavarthi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Probabilistic Circuits for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Joint probabilistic modeling is essential for forecasting irregular multivariate time series (IMTS) to accurately quantify uncertainty. Existing approaches often struggle to balance model expressivity with consistent marginalization, frequently leading to unreliable or contradictory forecasts. To address this, we propose CircuITS, a novel architecture for probabilistic IMTS forecasting based on sum-product networks (SPNs). Our model is flexible in capturing intricate dependencies between time series channels while structurally guaranteeing valid joint distributions. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that CircuITS achieves superior joint and marginal density estimation compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

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Dual-Context Analog Retrieval for Time Series Forecasting

Most long-term time-series forecasting models map the look-back window directly to the full horizon in a single pass. While efficient, this design does not explicitly identify which historical states are most relevant to different future segments or exploit what followed those states. Analog forecasting addresses this by retrieving past states similar to the present and using their observed continuations, but single nearest matches can be unreliable and overlapping patches may produce redundant candidates. We propose DuoTS, a Dual-Context Time Series forecasting model that uses retrieved evidence without relying on it exclusively. DuoTS first produces a base forecast with a parallel patch encoder and linear prediction head, then progressively refines it one future patch at a time. Each refinement combines two views: a current context that attends to recent tokens and captures the latest dynamics, and a detail context that provides distinct retrieved analogs together with their subsequent trajectories. Patch-wise refinement allows the model to balance these views across the forecast horizon and associate each future segment with evidence appropriate to its temporal distance from the present. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that DuoTS achieves state-of-the-art performance, while ablations confirm the contribution of each context. The refinement mechanism is also model-agnostic, requiring only an encoded look-back window and the future-patch position, and can therefore be integrated into existing forecasting models.

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Most-Recent Anchoring with Recurrent Ordering for Time Series Forecasting

Long-term forecasting models commonly process all patches in a look-back window using the same fixed stack. Older contextual patches and recent evidence therefore receive the same computational depth. Yet the information closest to the forecast and the more distant context do not contribute equally. Uniform processing leaves this distinction unexpressed in the architecture. We propose MARO, a Most-Recent Anchoring with Recurrent Ordering model that processes the look-back window from the most recent patch to the oldest. The most recent patch serves as the anchor. It initializes the latent state and conditions each subsequent step, so older patches are folded into a representation that remains centered on recent evidence. A single shared module is reused at every step, so extending the scan further into the past introduces no additional parameters. Intermediate states retained during the scan allow the forecast head to weigh short and long portions of the history separately. This expresses recency through the order of recurrent refinement. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world time series datasets show that MARO achieves state-of-the-art performance on both long-term and short-term forecasting tasks.Ablation studies examine the contribution of the main architectural components.

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Gaussian Mixture Copula Processes for Irregular Time Series

We introduce Gaussian Mixture Copula Processes (GMCP), a conditional copula process for irregularly sampled multivariate time series (IMTS) that is expressive and marginalization consistent at the same time. Existing conditional copula processes achieve only one of the two. Gaussian copula processes are consistent by construction but confined to elliptical dependence, whereas attentional copulas such as TACTiS-2 are far more expressive but neither preserve the marginals they are built on nor guarantee that integrating out a target point returns the joint over the remaining ones. GMCP closes this gap by inferring the parameters of a Gaussian Mixture Copula from the context in a way that guarantees consistent marginalization. This yields a non-elliptical copula process with tractable likelihood and consistency guarantees. Our experiments show that copulas equipped with MargFlow, a normalizing-flow model for the univariate marginals fitted in isolation, outperform jointly trained baselines in probabilistic IMTS forecasting. We further provide evidence that GMCP is more expressive than Gaussian copula processes, and on par with the inconsistent TACTiS-2.

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MixBench-TS: A Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Benchmark Where Channel Mixing Pays Off

Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF) models that mix information across channels assume that the past of one channel carries information about the future of another. Yet they are evaluated on a small fixed set of standard datasets whose cross-channel structure is rarely examined. We ask two questions: "How can we reliably measure lagged, non-linear, and joint coupling in MTSF datasets?" and "Do the standard datasets actually have such coupling?" To answer the first, we test four candidate measures on synthetic datasets with planted ground-truth coupling: Granger Causality (GC), Transfer Entropy (TE), lagged Mutual Information (MI), and the CD gain, a model-based measure we introduce that compares a channel-dependent (CD) model to its channel-independent (CI) variant. Only lagged MI and the CD gain recover every planted coupling. For the second question, the answer is a definite no, as the standard datasets have a median of only 23% lagged-coupled channel pairs and a median CD gain of -4.9%, compared to 78% and +4.6% on chaotic ODE systems. We therefore propose MixBench-TS, a benchmark of 10 real-world datasets with a median of 55.5% lagged-coupled pairs and a median CD gain of +1.7%. Across six state-of-the-art models tuned under one protocol, CI models win on 10/10 (MSE) and 8/10 (MAE) standard datasets, but on only 3/10 and 2/10 MixBench-TS datasets. We recommend using our benchmark for evaluating new CD models. Moreover, we propose profiling new datasets with lagged MI and the CD gain before using them to evaluate multivariate models. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mixbench-ts-B027.

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Two-stage Odd Residual Flows for Mean-Preserving Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Probabilistic forecasting plays an essential role in risk-sensitive decision-making, particularly in long-horizon settings. However, existing approaches often face a fundamental trade-off between distributional flexibility and accurate mean prediction. Traditional parametric methods, such as Mean Variance Estimation (MVE), can suffer from degraded point accuracy when trained under joint Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) objectives, while modern-flexible generative models, including Normalizing Flows and Diffusion Models, typically rely on costly Monte Carlo sampling and may yield suboptimal mean estimates. To address this limitation, we propose Two-stage Odd Residual Flows (TORF), a framework that decouples mean forecasting from uncertainty estimation. In the first stage, a pre-trained deterministic model is used to produce an accurate mean prediction. In the second stage, a Restricted Normalizing Flow, with strictly odd functions learns flexible residual distributions around the point forecast, guaranteeing mean preservation from the first stage without sampling. Experiments show that TORF achieves state-of-the-art deterministic accuracy (NMAE) while providing strong density estimation performance (CRPS) on short and long-horizon forecasting.

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Do Tabular Foundation Models Agree with Themselves?

Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) are currently the best approach to tabular prediction problems. They are constructed as transformers that approximate the Bayesian posterior predictive distribution based on a pre-training prior. These univariate predictors can be converted into multivariate ones autoregressively by sampling one target and adding it to the features. However, the faithfulness of the resulting joint has not been investigated. Furthermore, TFMs cannot be evaluated against the posterior itself, at least not on real-world datasets, because the ground-truth distribution is unknown. We therefore propose asking a different question: could a model's predictions result from any joint distribution? To answer this question, we pose two requirements that any such model must satisfy. The first is marginalization consistency, which demands that marginalized conditionals are equal to directly predicted marginals. The second is factorization consistency, which demands that different factorization orders result in equal joint distributions. Every TFM that we evaluate violates both of these requirements for both classification and regression across all datasets.

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NPMixer: Hierarchical Neighboring Patch Mixing for Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting remains a challenge due to the complexity of local temporal dynamics and global dependencies across multiple variables. In this paper, we propose \textbf{N}eighboring \textbf{P}atching \textbf{Mixer} (\textbf{NPMixer}), a hierarchical architecture featuring a Learnable Stationary Wavelet Transform that adaptively learns filter coefficients to decompose signals into trend and detail components in a data-dependent manner. Our framework introduces a Neighboring Mixer Block that captures local temporal dynamics through a series of hierarchical MLP layers operating on non-overlapping patches. Specifically, the mixer block utilizes MLPs to learn temporal patterns within and across these patches, expanding the receptive field to capture multi-scale dependencies. A Channel-Mixing Encoder is applied to high-frequency components to learn channel correlations while preserving the stability of the underlying global trend. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that NPMixer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving better performance in 20 out of 28 ($71.4\%$) evaluated experimental setups for MSE.

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The Importance of Encoder Choice:A Tabular-Image Study

Multimodal learning usually requires a dedicated encoder per modality. When a tabular modality is involved, prior work has been mostly using a \emph{plain MLP} as the encoder. Yet if it were a strong encoder, the tabular domain would not be ``the last unconquered castle for deep learning''. This study evaluates state-of-the-art tabular models as encoders in the image-tabular setting for the first time. An obstacle stands out. In-Context Learning models, among the best performing methods in the tabular domain, require labels to process instances, making it non-trivial to embed training and test instances the same way. We addressed this problem across multiple models of this family. With this study, we would like to highlight the importance of encoder factor in the multimodal learning.

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Physiome-ODE: A Benchmark for Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Based on Biological ODEs

State-of-the-art methods for forecasting irregularly sampled time series with missing values predominantly rely on just four datasets and a few small toy examples for evaluation. While ordinary differential equations (ODE) are the prevalent models in science and engineering, a baseline model that forecasts a constant value outperforms ODE-based models from the last five years on three of these existing datasets. This unintuitive finding hampers further research on ODE-based models, a more plausible model family. In this paper, we develop a methodology to generate irregularly sampled multivariate time series (IMTS) datasets from ordinary differential equations and to select challenging instances via rejection sampling. Using this methodology, we create Physiome-ODE, a large and sophisticated benchmark of IMTS datasets consisting of 50 individual datasets, derived from real-world ordinary differential equations from research in biology. Physiome-ODE is the first benchmark for IMTS forecasting that we are aware of and an order of magnitude larger than the current evaluation setting of four datasets. Using our benchmark Physiome-ODE, we show qualitatively completely different results than those derived from the current four datasets: on Physiome-ODE ODE-based models can play to their strength and our benchmark can differentiate in a meaningful way between different IMTS forecasting models. This way, we expect to give a new impulse to research on ODE-based time series modeling.

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Mixing It Up: Exploring Mixer Networks for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Forecasting irregularly sampled multivariate time series with missing values (IMTS) is a fundamental challenge in domains such as healthcare, climate science, and biology. While recent advances in vision and time series forecasting have shown that lightweight MLP-based architectures (e.g., MLP-Mixer, TSMixer) can rival attention-based models in both accuracy and efficiency, their applicability to irregular and sparse time series remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose IMTS-Mixer, a novel architecture that adapts the principles of Mixer models to the IMTS setting. IMTS-Mixer introduces two key components: (1) ISCAM, a channel-wise encoder that transforms irregular observations into fixed-size vectors using simple MLPs, and (2) ConTP, a continuous time decoder that supports forecasting at arbitrary time points. In our experiments on established benchmark datasets we show that our model achieves state-of-the- art performance in both forecasting accuracy and inference time, while using fewer parameters compared to baselines.

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HPMixer: Hierarchical Patching for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

In long-term multivariate time series forecasting, effectively capturing both periodic patterns and residual dynamics is essential. To address this within standard deep learning benchmark settings, we propose the Hierarchical Patching Mixer (HPMixer), which models periodicity and residuals in a decoupled yet complementary manner. The periodic component utilizes a learnable cycle module [7] enhanced with a nonlinear channel-wise MLP for greater expressiveness. The residual component is processed through a Learnable Stationary Wavelet Transform (LSWT) to extract stable, shift-invariant frequency-domain representations. Subsequently, a channel-mixing encoder models explicit inter-channel dependencies, while a two-level non-overlapping hierarchical patching mechanism captures coarse- and fine-scale residual variations. By integrating decoupled periodicity modeling with structured, multi-scale residual learning, HPMixer provides an effective framework. Extensive experiments on standard multivariate benchmarks demonstrate that HPMixer achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance compared to recent baselines.

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TabResFlow: A Normalizing Spline Flow Model for Probabilistic Univariate Tabular Regression

Tabular regression is a well-studied problem with numerous industrial applications, yet most existing approaches focus on point estimation, often leading to overconfident predictions. This issue is particularly critical in industrial automation, where trustworthy decision-making is essential. Probabilistic regression models address this challenge by modeling prediction uncertainty. However, many conventional methods assume a fixed-shape distribution (typically Gaussian), and resort to estimating distribution parameters. This assumption is often restrictive, as real-world target distributions can be highly complex. To overcome this limitation, we introduce TabResFlow, a Normalizing Spline Flow model designed specifically for univariate tabular regression, where commonly used simple flow networks like RealNVP and Masked Autoregressive Flow (MAF) are unsuitable. TabResFlow consists of three key components: (1) An MLP encoder for each numerical feature. (2) A fully connected ResNet backbone for expressive feature extraction. (3) A conditional spline-based normalizing flow for flexible and tractable density estimation. We evaluate TabResFlow on nine public benchmark datasets, demonstrating that it consistently surpasses existing probabilistic regression models on likelihood scores. Our results demonstrate 9.64% improvement compared to the strongest probabilistic regression model (TreeFlow), and on average 5.6 times speed-up in inference time compared to the strongest deep learning alternative (NodeFlow). Additionally, we validate the practical applicability of TabResFlow in a real-world used car price prediction task under selective regression. To measure performance in this setting, we introduce a novel Area Under Risk Coverage (AURC) metric and show that TabResFlow achieves superior results across this metric.

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The Role of Active Learning in Modern Machine Learning

Even though Active Learning (AL) is widely studied, it is rarely applied in contexts outside its own scientific literature. We posit that the reason for this is AL's high computational cost coupled with the comparatively small lifts it is typically able to generate in scenarios with few labeled points. In this work we study the impact of different methods to combat this low data scenario, namely data augmentation (DA), semi-supervised learning (SSL) and AL. We find that AL is by far the least efficient method of solving the low data problem, generating a lift of only 1-4\% over random sampling, while DA and SSL methods can generate up to 60\% lift in combination with random sampling. However, when AL is combined with strong DA and SSL techniques, it surprisingly is still able to provide improvements. Based on these results, we frame AL not as a method to combat missing labels, but as the final building block to squeeze the last bits of performance out of data after appropriate DA and SSL methods as been applied.

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Marginalization Consistent Probabilistic Forecasting of Irregular Time Series via Mixture of Separable flows

Probabilistic forecasting models for joint distributions of targets in irregular time series with missing values are a heavily under-researched area in machine learning, with, to the best of our knowledge, only two Models have been researched so far: The Gaussian Process Regression model, and ProFITi. While ProFITi, thanks to using multivariate normalizing flows, is very expressive, leading to better predictive performance, it suffers from marginalization inconsistency: It does not guarantee that the marginal distributions of a subset of variables in its predictive distributions coincide with the directly predicted distributions of these variables. When asked to directly predict marginal distributions, they are often vastly inaccurate. We propose MOSES (Marginalization Consistent Mixture of Separable Flows), a model that parametrizes a stochastic process through a mixture of several latent multivariate Gaussian Processes combined with separable univariate Normalizing Flows. In particular, MOSES can be analytically marginalized, allowing it to directly answer a wider range of probabilistic queries than most competitors. Experiments on four datasets show that MOSES achieves both accurate joint and marginal predictions, surpassing all other marginalization consistent baselines, while only trailing slightly behind ProFITi in joint prediction, but vastly superior when predicting marginal distributions.

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Probabilistic Forecasting of Irregular Time Series via Conditional Flows

Probabilistic forecasting of irregularly sampled multivariate time series with missing values is an important problem in many fields, including health care, astronomy, and climate. State-of-the-art methods for the task estimate only marginal distributions of observations in single channels and at single timepoints, assuming a fixed-shape parametric distribution. In this work, we propose a novel model, ProFITi, for probabilistic forecasting of irregularly sampled time series with missing values using conditional normalizing flows. The model learns joint distributions over the future values of the time series conditioned on past observations and queried channels and times, without assuming any fixed shape of the underlying distribution. As model components, we introduce a novel invertible triangular attention layer and an invertible non-linear activation function on and onto the whole real line. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets and demonstrate that the proposed model provides $4$ times higher likelihood over the previously best model.

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Functional Latent Dynamics for Irregularly Sampled Time Series Forecasting

Irregularly sampled time series with missing values are often observed in multiple real-world applications such as healthcare, climate and astronomy. They pose a significant challenge to standard deep learning models that operate only on fully observed and regularly sampled time series. In order to capture the continuous dynamics of the irregular time series, many models rely on solving an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) in the hidden state. These ODE-based models tend to perform slow and require large memory due to sequential operations and a complex ODE solver. As an alternative to complex ODE-based models, we propose a family of models called Functional Latent Dynamics (FLD). Instead of solving the ODE, we use simple curves which exist at all time points to specify the continuous latent state in the model. The coefficients of these curves are learned only from the observed values in the time series ignoring the missing values. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that FLD achieves better performance compared to the best ODE-based model while reducing the runtime and memory overhead. Specifically, FLD requires an order of magnitude less time to infer the forecasts compared to the best performing forecasting model.

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Are EEG Sequences Time Series? EEG Classification with Time Series Models and Joint Subject Training

As with most other data domains, EEG data analysis relies on rich domain-specific preprocessing. Beyond such preprocessing, machine learners would hope to deal with such data as with any other time series data. For EEG classification many models have been developed with layer types and architectures we typically do not see in time series classification. Furthermore, typically separate models for each individual subject are learned, not one model for all of them. In this paper, we systematically study the differences between EEG classification models and generic time series classification models. We describe three different model setups to deal with EEG data from different subjects, subject-specific models (most EEG literature), subject-agnostic models and subject-conditional models. In experiments on three datasets, we demonstrate that off-the-shelf time series classification models trained per subject perform close to EEG classification models, but that do not quite reach the performance of domain-specific modeling. Additionally, we combine time-series models with subject embeddings to train one joint subject-conditional classifier on all subjects. The resulting models are competitive with dedicated EEG models in 2 out of 3 datasets, even outperforming all EEG methods on one of them.

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