# Minimal Time Series Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09791 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09791/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [A Transformer-based Framework for Multivariate Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02803/) (2020)
- [ContiFormer: Continuous-Time Transformer for Irregular Time Series Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10635/) (2024)
- [Introduction to Sequence Modeling with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19597/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer is the state-of-the-art model for many natural language processing, computer vision, and audio analysis problems. Transformer effectively combines information from the past input and output samples in auto-regressive manner so that each sample becomes aware of all inputs and outputs. In sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) modeling, the transformer processed samples become effective in predicting the next output. Time series forecasting is a Seq2Seq problem. The original architecture is defined for discrete input and output sequence tokens, but to adopt it for time series, the model must be adapted for continuous data. This work introduces minimal adaptations to make the original transformer architecture suitable for continuous value time series data.