# Kernel-U-Net: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting using Custom Kernels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01479 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01479/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Non-stationary Transformers: Exploring the Stationarity in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14415/) (2022)
- [HDLTex: Hierarchical Deep Learning for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08267/) (2017)
- [U-Time: A Fully Convolutional Network for Time Series Segmentation Applied to Sleep Staging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11162/) (2019)
- [Practical Blind Image Denoising via Swin-Conv-UNet and Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13278/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Anomaly Prediction: A Novel Approach with Explicit Delay and Horizon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04377/) (2024)
- [Learning K-U-Net with constant complexity: An Application to time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02438/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Perturbed Adaptive Method for Infinite Task-Conflicting Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11902/) (2025)
- [Climate-Dyna Deep Hedging for XVAs: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning, Residual Climate HVA, and Hedge-Instrument Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01208/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series forecasting task predicts future trends based on historical information. Transformer-based U-Net architectures, despite their success in medical image segmentation, have limitations in both expressiveness and computation efficiency in time series forecasting as evidenced in YFormer. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Kernel-U-Net, a flexible and kernel-customizable U-shape neural network architecture. The kernel-U-Net encoder compresses the input series into latent vectors, and its symmetric decoder subsequently expands these vectors into output series. Specifically, Kernel-U-Net separates the procedure of partitioning input time series into patches from kernel manipulation, thereby providing the convenience of customized executing kernels. Our method offers two primary advantages: 1) Flexibility in kernel customization to adapt to specific datasets; and 2) Enhanced computational efficiency, with the complexity of the Transformer layer reduced to linear. Experiments on seven real-world datasets, demonstrate that Kernel-U-Net's performance either exceeds or meets that of the existing state-of-the-art model in the majority of cases in channel-independent settings. The source code for Kernel-U-Net will be made publicly available for further research and application.