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Tiny-TSM: Efficiently Training a Lightweight SOTA Time Series Foundation Model (arxiv.org)
1 point by skanderbm 290 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A small 23-million-parameter model for predicting future values in time series is trained on one GPU using synthetic data and a way of scaling inputs that speeds up learning. It beat every time-series model tested on medium- and long-term forecasts, matching much larger ones.

Abstract

We present Tiny-TSM, a time series foundation model characterized by small scale, economical training, and state-of-the-art performance. It comprises 23M total parameters, trained on a single A100 GPU in less than a week using a new synthetic data generation and data augmentation pipeline (SynthTS). Without any neural architecture search, hyperparameter tuning, or scaling up model size, Tiny-TSM achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of time series benchmark datasets, often outperforming much larger models and even matching the performance of much larger, industrial-scale, likely highly tuned foundation models. Specifically, Tiny-TSM outperforms all other time series foundation models we evaluated on medium- and long-term forecasting tasks under MSE loss, while short-term accuracy is still competitive with state-of-the-art models. We also introduce a causal input normalization scheme that enables time series models to be trained with dense next-token prediction loss, significantly accelerating convergence speed and reducing training time. All experiments were conducted on a single A100 GPU, illustrating the practicality of the proposed approach in a resource-constrained setting.

Felix Birkel
arXiv:2511.19272 · cs.LG · submitted Nov 24, 2025
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