# Lightweight Wrappers for Adapting Time Series Foundation Models to Regional Drought Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17511 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17511/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [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)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [FourCastNet: Accelerating Global High-Resolution Weather Forecasting using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05419/) (2022)
- [FiLM: Frequency improved Legendre Memory Model for Long-term Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08897/) (2022)
- [From Tables to Time: Extending TabPFN-v2 to Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02945/) (2025)

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

- [Systematic Evaluation of TabPFN-TS and Chronos-2 for Zero-Shot Heat Load Forecasting in District Heating Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20024/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) demonstrate strong zero-shot forecasting capabilities across diverse domains. However, their application to regional climate forecasting faces practical challenges: model weights are often proprietary, local training records are limited, and computational budgets are constrained, making traditional fine-tuning approaches infeasible. To address these constraints, we introduce a lightweight, black-box adaptation framework (requiring no access to backbone parameters and no backbone fine-tuning) that enhances frozen TSFMs at inference time through two plug-and-play wrappers: textbfSMRtextsuperscript2 (Stationarity aware multi-resolution Residual), which decomposes the input into multi-resolution temporal views, learns stride specific residual corrections that capture regional dynamics, then adaptively ensembles them into a single forecast, and MBB (Moving Block Bootstrap), which preserves temporal dependencies through block resampling and ensembles over temporally coherent residual perturbations to stabilize the point forecast. Both wrappers instantiate the same bagging style principle: they build diverse views of the input or its residuals, forecast each with the same frozen backbone, and aggregate, so all adaptation comes from inference time ensembling rather than any weight update. Evaluated on one month ahead Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) prediction across multiple sites in South Australia, our framework consistently improves forecasting performance across several backbone models, demonstrating up to 26% mean squared error (MSE) reduction over the corresponding frozen backbone while enabling practical deployment in resource constrained regional forecasting systems.