# WindFM: An Open-Source Foundation Model for Zero-Shot Wind Power Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06311/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [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)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07815/) (2024)
- [A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10688/) (2023)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [Unified Training of Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02592/) (2024)
- [MOMENT: A Family of Open Time-series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03885/) (2024)
- [Non-stationary Transformers: Exploring the Stationarity in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14415/) (2022)
- [TimeMixer: Decomposable Multiscale Mixing for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14616/) (2024)
- [Time-MoE: Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Models with Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16040/) (2024)
- [TimeXer: Empowering Transformers for Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19072/) (2024)
- [Image and Video Tokenization with Binary Spherical Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07548/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Capabilities and Limitations of Large Language Models in the Electric Energy Sector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09125/) (2024)
- [Kronos: A Foundation Model for the Language of Financial Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02739/) (2025)
- [Continuous and Distribution-free Probabilistic Wind Power Forecasting: A Conditional Normalizing Flow Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02433/) (2022)
- [PriceFM: Foundation Model for Probabilistic Electricity Price Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04875/) (2025)

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

- [UniWind: Day-Ahead Wind Power Forecasting via Physics-Informed State Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01670/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-quality wind power forecasting is crucial for the operation of modern power grids. However, prevailing data-driven paradigms either train a site-specific model which cannot generalize to other locations or rely on fine-tuning of general-purpose time series foundation models which are difficult to incorporate domain-specific data in the energy sector. This paper introduces WindFM, a lightweight and generative Foundation Model designed specifically for probabilistic wind power forecasting. WindFM employs a discretize-and-generate framework. A specialized time-series tokenizer first converts continuous multivariate observations into discrete, hierarchical tokens. Subsequently, a decoder-only Transformer learns a universal representation of wind generation dynamics by autoregressively pre-training on these token sequences. Using the comprehensive WIND Toolkit dataset comprising approximately 150 billion time steps from more than 126,000 sites, WindFM develops a foundational understanding of the complex interplay between atmospheric conditions and power output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our compact 8.1M parameter model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on both deterministic and probabilistic tasks, outperforming specialized models and larger foundation models without any fine-tuning. In particular, WindFM exhibits strong adaptiveness under out-of-distribution data from a different continent, demonstrating the robustness and transferability of its learned representations. Our pre-trained model is publicly available at https://github.com/shiyu-coder/WindFM.