# Probabilistic Forecasting for Building Energy Systems using Time-Series Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00630 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00630/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [DeepAR: Probabilistic Forecasting with Autoregressive Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04110/) (2017)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07815/) (2024)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10688/) (2023)
- [Unified Training of Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02592/) (2024)
- [Are Language Models Actually Useful for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16964/) (2024)
- [Tiny Time Mixers (TTMs): Fast Pre-trained Models for Enhanced Zero/Few-Shot Forecasting of Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03955/) (2024)
- [The Expressive Power of Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17513/) (2023)
- [Stochastic Mirror Descent on Overparameterized Nonlinear Models: Convergence, Implicit Regularization, and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03830/) (2019)
- [BuildingsBench: A Large-Scale Dataset of 900K Buildings and Benchmark for Short-Term Load Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00142/) (2023)
- [ORFit: One-Pass Learning via Bridging Orthogonal Gradient Descent and Recursive Least-Squares](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13853/) (2022)
- [TimeGPT in Load Forecasting: A Large Time Series Model Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04885/) (2024)
- [A Worrying Analysis of Probabilistic Time-series Models for Sales Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10715/) (2020)
- [A Scalable and Transferable Time Series Prediction Framework for Demand Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19402/) (2024)

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

- [Thermal-GEMs: Generalized Models for Building Thermal Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16443/) (2026)
- [Can Time-Series Foundation Models Perform Building Energy Management Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11250/) (2025)
- [ThermoForce: A Physics-Structured Interventional World Model for Building HVAC Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03942/) (2026)
- [Toward a foundational thermal model for residential buildings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01364/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Decision-making in building energy systems critically depends on the predictive accuracy of relevant time-series models. In scenarios lacking extensive data from a target building, foundation models (FMs) represent a promising technology that can leverage prior knowledge from vast and diverse pre-training datasets to construct accurate probabilistic predictors for use in decision-making tools. This paper investigates the applicability and fine-tuning strategies of time-series foundation models (TSFMs) in building energy forecasting. We analyze both full fine-tuning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches, particularly low-rank adaptation (LoRA), by using real-world data from a commercial net-zero energy building to capture signals such as room occupancy, carbon emissions, plug loads, and HVAC energy consumption. Our analysis reveals that the zero-shot predictive performance of TSFMs is generally suboptimal. To address this shortcoming, we demonstrate that employing either full fine-tuning or parameter-efficient fine-tuning significantly enhances forecasting accuracy, even with limited historical data. Notably, fine-tuning with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) substantially reduces computational costs without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, fine-tuned TSFMs consistently outperform state-of-the-art deep forecasting models (e.g., temporal fusion transformers) in accuracy, robustness, and generalization across varying building zones and seasonal conditions. These results underline the efficacy of TSFMs for practical, data-constrained building energy management systems, enabling improved decision-making in pursuit of energy efficiency and sustainability.