# Fremer: Lightweight and Effective Frequency Transformer for Workload Forecasting in Cloud Services

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12908 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12908/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [SCINet: Time Series Modeling and Forecasting with Sample Convolution and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09305/) (2021)
- [TFB: Towards Comprehensive and Fair Benchmarking of Time Series Forecasting Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20150/) (2024)
- [Earthformer: Exploring Space-Time Transformers for Earth System Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05833/) (2022)
- [FiLM: Frequency improved Legendre Memory Model for Long-term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08897/) (2022)
- [N-HiTS: Neural Hierarchical Interpolation for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12886/) (2022)
- [SparseTSF: Modeling Long-term Time Series Forecasting with 1k Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00946/) (2024)
- [AirFormer: Predicting Nationwide Air Quality in China with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15979/) (2022)
- [FilterNet: Harnessing Frequency Filters for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01623/) (2024)
- [Fredformer: Frequency Debiased Transformer for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09009/) (2024)
- [BasisFormer: Attention-based Time Series Forecasting with Learnable and Interpretable Basis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20496/) (2023)
- [FECAM: Frequency Enhanced Channel Attention Mechanism for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01209/) (2022)
- [OneShotSTL: One-Shot Seasonal-Trend Decomposition For Online Time Series Anomaly Detection And Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01506/) (2023)
- [workload forecasting and resource management models based on machine learning for cloud computing environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15112/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SWIFT: Spatio-temporal Wavelet Integrated Forecasting Framework for Workload Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02524/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Workload forecasting is pivotal in cloud service applications, such as auto-scaling and scheduling, with profound implications for operational efficiency. Although Transformer-based forecasting models have demonstrated remarkable success in general tasks, their computational efficiency often falls short of the stringent requirements in large-scale cloud environments. Given that most workload series exhibit complicated periodic patterns, addressing these challenges in the frequency domain offers substantial advantages. To this end, we propose Fremer, an efficient and effective deep forecasting model. Fremer fulfills three critical requirements: it demonstrates superior efficiency, outperforming most Transformer-based forecasting models; it achieves exceptional accuracy, surpassing all state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in workload forecasting; and it exhibits robust performance for multi-period series. Furthermore, we collect and open-source four high-quality, open-source workload datasets derived from ByteDance's cloud services, encompassing workload data from thousands of computing instances. Extensive experiments on both our proprietary datasets and public benchmarks demonstrate that Fremer consistently outperforms baseline models, achieving average improvements of 5.5% in MSE, 4.7% in MAE, and 8.6% in SMAPE over SOTA models, while simultaneously reducing parameter scale and computational costs. Additionally, in a proactive auto-scaling test based on Kubernetes, Fremer improves average latency by 18.78% and reduces resource consumption by 2.35%, underscoring its practical efficacy in real-world applications.