# RWKV-TS: Beyond Traditional Recurrent Neural Network for Time Series Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09093/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (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)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02186/) (2022)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08621/) (2023)
- [Detecting Spacecraft Anomalies Using LSTMs and Nonparametric Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04431/) (2018)
- [Anomaly Transformer: Time Series Anomaly Detection with Association Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02642/) (2021)
- [Non-stationary Transformers: Exploring the Stationarity in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14415/) (2022)
- [ROCKET: Exceptionally fast and accurate time series classification using random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13051/) (2019)
- [The UEA multivariate time series classification archive, 2018](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00075/) (2018)
- [SCINet: Time Series Modeling and Forecasting with Sample Convolution and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09305/) (2021)
- [Long-term Forecasting with TiDE: Time-series Dense Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08424/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Scalable Representation Learning for Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10738/) (2019)
- [A Multi-Horizon Quantile Recurrent Forecaster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11053/) (2017)
- [Less Is More: Fast Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Light Sampling-oriented MLP Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01186/) (2022)
- [ETSformer: Exponential Smoothing Transformers for Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01381/) (2022)
- [N-HiTS: Neural Hierarchical Interpolation for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12886/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14735/) (2024)
- [CycleNet: Enhancing Time Series Forecasting through Modeling Periodic Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18479/) (2024)
- [State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09516/) (2024)
- [Attractor Memory for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting: A Chaos Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11463/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Wearable Sensor-based Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15349/) (2024)
- [VisualRWKV: Exploring Recurrent Neural Networks for Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13362/) (2024)
- [Time-SSM: Simplifying and Unifying State Space Models for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16312/) (2024)
- [FlexAttention for Efficient High-Resolution Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20228/) (2024)
- [Test Time Learning for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14012/) (2024)
- [A Survey of RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14847/) (2024)
- [C3-OWD: A Curriculum Cross-modal Contrastive Learning Framework for Open-World Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23316/) (2025)
- [Bayes-CATSI: A variational Bayesian deep learning framework for medical time series data imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01847/) (2024)
- [Position: The Inevitable End of One-Architecture-Fits-All-Domains in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01736/) (2026)
- [Probabilistic Low-Voltage Peak Load Forecasting with Time Series Foundation Models Evaluated on Application-Oriented Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01966/) (2026)
- [BlackGoose Rimer: Harnessing RWKV-7 as a Simple yet Superior Replacement for Transformers in Large-Scale Time Series Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06121/) (2025)
- [MFRS: A Multi-Frequency Reference Series Approach to Scalable and Accurate Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08328/) (2025)
- [DREMnet: An Interpretable Denoising Framework for Semi-Airborne Transient Electromagnetic Signal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22223/) (2025)
- [Hydra: Dual Exponentiated Memory for Multivariate Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00989/) (2025)
- [FRWKV:Frequency-Domain Linear Attention for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07539/) (2025)
- [SIDE: Socially Informed Drought Estimation Toward Understanding Societal Impact Dynamics of Environmental Crisis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12575/) (2024)
- [SCRWKV: Ultra-Compact Structure-Calibrated Vision-RWKV for Topological Crack Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14926/) (2026)
- [FRWKV+: Periodic-Aware Adaptive Gating for Frequency-Space Linear Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15690/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures, such as LSTM and GRU, have historically held prominence in time series tasks. However, they have recently seen a decline in their dominant position across various time series tasks. As a result, recent advancements in time series forecasting have seen a notable shift away from RNNs towards alternative architectures such as Transformers, MLPs, and CNNs. To go beyond the limitations of traditional RNNs, we design an efficient RNN-based model for time series tasks, named RWKV-TS, with three distinctive features: (i) A novel RNN architecture characterized by O(L) time complexity and memory usage. (ii) An enhanced ability to capture long-term sequence information compared to traditional RNNs. (iii) High computational efficiency coupled with the capacity to scale up effectively. Through extensive experimentation, our proposed RWKV-TS model demonstrates competitive performance when compared to state-of-the-art Transformer-based or CNN-based models. Notably, RWKV-TS exhibits not only comparable performance but also demonstrates reduced latency and memory utilization. The success of RWKV-TS encourages further exploration and innovation in leveraging RNN-based approaches within the domain of Time Series. The combination of competitive performance, low latency, and efficient memory usage positions RWKV-TS as a promising avenue for future research in time series tasks. Code is available at:hrefhttps://github.com/howard-hou/RWKV-TS https://github.com/howard-hou/RWKV-TS