What Does an Observability Foundation Model Know?
cs.LG, cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-10-04
Updated: 2026-10-04
Comments: Accepted to NeurIPS Main Conference '26. 25 pages
Journal ref: NeurIPS 2026
Code: https://github.com/DhyeyMavani2003/toto-interp
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
The gist: A linear probe can show that a label is recoverable from a model's hidden states, but not whether that goes beyond what the input already reveals, or whether the model uses it.
Terminology
Abstract
A linear probe can show that a label is recoverable from a model's hidden states, but not whether that goes beyond what the input already reveals, or whether the model uses it. We audit Toto, an observability forecasting foundation model, on the Benchmark of Observability Metrics (BOOM) across five series-disjoint resplits, comparing linear probes on its frozen residual stream with models that read the raw input window and with Toto's architecture stripped of its trained configuration. Short-vs-medium cadence and metric type are more linearly recoverable from Toto's residuals than from the strongest raw-window model in every resplit (macro-F1 0.766 vs. 0.633 and 0.545 vs. 0.498). Domain is nearly tied, and series cardinality is recovered far better from the raw window. MOMENT-base shows related cadence, metric-type, and domain readouts. Recoverability is not use: exchanging Toto's residuals with those of high-burst donors moves a future-burstiness readout as intended but does not make forecasts consistently burstier than a randomized donor. A BOOM-trained coordination probe has negative zero-shot R squared on the tested external benchmarks. We report each label against its strongest baseline.
Sources
- Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes
- Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series
- Toto: Time Series Optimized Transformer for Observability
- This Time is Different: An Observability Perspective on Time Series Foundation Models
- A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting
- An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
- MOMENT: A Family of Open Time-series Foundation Models
- Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT
- A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers
- On the Internal Semantics of Time-Series Foundation Models
- fev-bench: A Realistic Benchmark for Time Series Forecasting
- Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition
- Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting
Related papers
- Polynomial-Augmented Neural Networks (PANNs) with Weak Orthogonality Constraints for Enhanced Function and PDE Approximation
- AIRL-S: Unifying Reinforcement Learning and Search-Based Test-Time Scaling via Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning
- Transformers as Bayesian In-Context Experimenters: Smoothness-Adaptive Efficient ATE Estimation
- Convergence issues in Relational Concept Analysis based on AOC-posets
- Beliefs Beyond Posteriors: The Predictive Cost of ELBO Binding
- Understanding Diffusion Models via Ratio-Based Function Approximation with SignReLU Networks