# TimeExpert: Boosting Long Time Series Forecasting with Temporal Mix of Experts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23145 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23145/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [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)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [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)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Unified Training of Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02592/) (2024)
- [Fundamentals of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03314/) (2018)
- [SCINet: Time Series Modeling and Forecasting with Sample Convolution and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09305/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Denoising Diffusion Models for Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12072/) (2021)
- [Long-term Forecasting with TiDE: Time-series Dense Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08424/) (2023)
- [LSTM: A Search Space Odyssey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.04069/) (2015)
- [Time-MoE: Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Models with Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16040/) (2024)
- [Timer: Generative Pre-trained Transformers Are Large Time Series Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02368/) (2024)
- [Is Mamba Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11144/) (2024)
- [SOFTS: Efficient Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Series-Core Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14197/) (2024)
- [TimePro: Efficient Multivariate Long-term Time Series Forecasting with Variable- and Time-Aware Hyper-state](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20774/) (2025)

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

- [WaveMoE: A Wavelet-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts Foundation Model for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10544/) (2026)
- [Stiff Circuit System Modeling via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24727/) (2025)
- [Perceive, Route and Modulate: Dynamic Pattern Recalibration for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06310/) (2026)
- [Dynamic TMoE: A Drift-Aware Dynamic Mixture of Experts Framework for Non-Stationary Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20678/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based architectures dominate time series modeling by enabling global attention over all timestamps, yet their rigid 'one-size-fits-all' context aggregation fails to address two critical challenges in real-world data: (1) inherent lag effects, where the relevance of historical timestamps to a query varies dynamically; (2) anomalous segments, which introduce noisy signals that degrade forecasting accuracy. To resolve these problems, we propose the Temporal Mix of Experts (TMOE), a novel attention-level mechanism that reimagines key-value (K-V) pairs as local experts (each specialized in a distinct temporal context) and performs adaptive expert selection for each query via localized filtering of irrelevant timestamps. Complementing this local adaptation, a shared global expert preserves the Transformer's strength in capturing long-range dependencies. We then replace the vanilla attention mechanism in popular time-series Transformer frameworks (i.e., PatchTST and Timer) with TMOE, without extra structural modifications, yielding our specific version TimeExpert and general version TimeExpert-G. Extensive experiments on seven real-world long-term forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that TimeExpert and TimeExpert-G outperform state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/xwmaxwma/TimeExpert.
