Tabby: An Open Pretraining Recipe for Time Series Foundation Models
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-09-12
Updated: 2026-09-29
Comments: 43 pages, 3 figures, 32 tables. Technical report
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The gist: In this report, we release Tabby, a long context probabilistic time series foundation model, together with a complete and open recipe of how it was built.
Terminology
Abstract
In this report, we release Tabby, a long context probabilistic time series foundation model, together with a complete and open recipe of how it was built. Tabby adopts an encoder-only patch Transformer architecture and concentrates the contributions on the data and the training procedure. The pretraining corpus combines an extended real-world collection, GIFT-Eval-Pretrain+ and BLAST, with synthetic data from KernelSynth and CauKerV2, an online generator that composes temporal dynamics through randomly sampled structural causal models. Training couples a progressive convergence schedule, which yields reusable intermediate checkpoints, with a deep quantile supervision objective for intermediate layers. The resulting 145M parameter backbone supports contexts of up to 8,192 observations and serves forecasting, classification, and anomaly detection, while a prompt-tuning module further improves in-distribution forecasting performance with the pretrained weights frozen. Tabby achieves competitive zero-shot forecasting performance on GIFT-Eval and the out-of-distribution TIME benchmark, while the same pretrained backbone also supports classification on the UCR Archive and zero-shot anomaly detection on TSB-AD-U. We release training pipeline and model as open source at huawei-noah/trustworthyAI.
Sources
- GIFT-Eval: A Benchmark For General Time Series Forecasting Model Evaluation
- Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series
- Chronos-2: From Univariate to Universal Forecasting
- TiRex: Zero-Shot Forecasting Across Long and Short Horizons with Enhanced In-Context Learning
- Universal Redundancies in Time Series Foundation Models
- Toto: Time Series Optimized Transformer for Observability
- A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting
- The UCR Time Series Archive
- BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
- ForecastPFN: Synthetically-Trained Zero-Shot Forecasting
- Mantis: Lightweight Foundation Model for Time Series Classification
- MOMENT: A Family of Open Time-series Foundation Models
- TabPFN: A Transformer That Solves Small Tabular Classification Problems in a Second
- MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies
- A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting: Architectural Diversity and Open Challenges
- Foundation Models for Time Series: A Survey
- Towards Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Time Series Anomaly Detection: Leveraging Synthetic Data and Relative Context Discrepancy
- Deeply-Supervised Nets
- Flow Matching for Generative Modeling
- Moirai 2.0: When Less Is More for Time Series Forecasting
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