Priyanka Nihalchandani, Naman Srivastava, Varun Ojha +1cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Federated adaptation of time-series foundation models (TSFMs) is attractive for building energy forecasting because meter data are private, distributed, and highly non-IID. However, a single parameter-sharing strategy is unlikely to serve all pretrained TSFMs or building clients: fully shared adapters can suppress building-specific temporal behavior, while fully local adaptation discards cross-building transfer. We propose a personalized federated sparse adaptation framework with a heterogeneous temporal mixture-of-experts (MoE) adapter placed after the pretrained TSFM representation. A sequence-level router maps each 168-hour context window to a top-$k$ subset of experts specialized for periodicity, long-range interactions, local variation, trend-residual structure, and multi-resolution behavior. We compare global FL, local training, and personalized FL variants with globally shared or client-private expert banks. Across 50 buildings and three TSFM backbones, personalization consistently outperforms Global FL-MoE and Local MoE, while the best sparse-adaptation strategy varies by backbone and metric. Routing behavior further reveals client-level expert specialization, expert concentration, and near-uniform routing across backbones, showing that federated TSFM adaptation should be both client-aware and backbone-aware.
Inspired by advances in natural language processing and computer vision, "time-series foundation models" (TSFMs) have recently been introduced with the promise of strong generalization across diverse time-series tasks, including forecasting, classification, and anomaly detection, as well as across domains such as healthcare, climate science, and manufacturing. However, their utility for gas-sensing data remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper systematically evaluates recent TSFMs on electronic nose (E-Nose) data. In particular, we investigate whether embeddings produced by representative TSFMs, including Chronos-2 and MOMENT, provide effective representations for gas identification and concentration prediction. Specifically, we show that fine-tuning is necessary to achieve satisfactory performance on E-Nose data, and fusing TSFM embeddings with representations learned by specialized predictive models can further improve the performance, suggesting both the potential and limitations of current TSFMs for gas-sensing applications.
Blood glucose forecasting models are foundational for modern diabetes management systems, as reliable short-term predictions can enable proactive interventions, support automated insulin delivery, and reduce the risk of hypo- and hyperglycemic events. From a modeling perspective, glucose forecasting poses unique challenges due to heterogeneous physiological dynamics across diabetes populations. Traditional machine learning and deep learning models have been extensively evaluated for glucose prediction, yet recent time-series foundation models (TSFMs) remain much less studied in this setting. To bridge this gap, we present GlucoFM-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating state-of-the-art TSFMs alongside supervised deep learning models for blood glucose forecasting. We assess eight representative architectures, including pre-trained TSFMs, time-series large language models, and task-specific deep learning models, across 15 publicly available diabetes-relevant datasets comprising 1,117 individuals with type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, and no diabetes. Models are evaluated under zero-shot, few-shot, and full-shot protocols, with systematic variation in context length and prediction horizon. Across datasets, pre-trained TSFMs, especially Chronos-2 and TimesFM, show strong zero-shot and few-shot transfer, with the best zero-shot model performing within 5% of the best full-shot supervised model. Yet, when task-specific data are abundant, a lightweight LSTM remains strongest, outperforming TSFMs by 4--21% under full-shot training. Stratified analyses reveal persistent challenges in T1D cohorts and hypo-/hyperglycemic ranges, highlighting the need for evaluation beyond aggregate error metrics. Together, GlucoFM-Bench provides a standardized and reproducible foundation for evaluating, comparing, and improving foundation models for blood glucose forecasting.