# Uncertainty-Aware Transfer Learning for Cross-Building Energy Forecasting: Toward Robust and Scalable District-Level Energy Management

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29733 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29733/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 6 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [Unified Training of Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02592/) (2024)
- [Transfer Learning on Transformers for Building Energy Consumption Forecasting -- A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14107/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scaling data-driven energy forecasting to district level requires models that can be re-used across buildings with minimal target-domain data and honest uncertainty estimates. We present an uncertainty-aware transfer learning (TL) framework for cross-building energy forecasting based on the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT), evaluated on a newly released high-resolution real sub-meter dataset: an educational building at Aalborg University, Denmark (source) and the multi-typology NEST building at EMPA, Switzerland (target). We introduce the Transfer Robustness Index (TRI), an architecture-agnostic metric for quantifying generalization quality across domain gaps. A four-strategy layer-freezing ablation shows that Probe-Only fine-tuning, updating only 455 output-layer parameters out of 806K, achieves the best transfer quality (TRI = 3,097), outperforming full fine-tuning and suggesting that TFT encoders learn transferable temporal representations. Monte Carlo Dropout yields a prediction interval coverage probability of 93.2%, close to the nominal 95% target. A data-scarcity analysis further shows monotonic improvement with increasing target-domain data, providing practical guidance for district energy deployment.