Efficient Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Calibrated Language Models with Privileged Knowledge Distillation (2505.02138v2)

Abstract: Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) endeavors to predict future observations given historical data, playing a crucial role in time series data management systems. With advancements in LLMs, recent studies employ textual prompt tuning to infuse the knowledge of LLMs into MTSF. However, the deployment of LLMs often suffers from low efficiency during the inference phase. To address this problem, we introduce TimeKD, an efficient MTSF framework that leverages the calibrated LLMs and privileged knowledge distillation. TimeKD aims to generate high-quality future representations from the proposed cross-modality teacher model and cultivate an effective student model. The cross-modality teacher model adopts calibrated LLMs (CLMs) with ground truth prompts, motivated by the paradigm of Learning Under Privileged Information (LUPI). In addition, we design a subtractive cross attention (SCA) mechanism to refine these representations. To cultivate an effective student model, we propose an innovative privileged knowledge distillation (PKD) mechanism including correlation and feature distillation. PKD enables the student to replicate the teacher's behavior while minimizing their output discrepancy. Extensive experiments on real data offer insight into the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of the proposed TimeKD.