MUSE: Dependency-Aware Adaptation of a Frozen Vision Backbone for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time-series forecasting is essential to many real-world applications. Recent large vision models (LVMs) offer a promising paradigm by transferring cross-domain visual priors to time-series forecasting. However, existing LVM-based methods face two key challenges: balancing independent visual representation spaces with cross-variable dependency modeling, and adapting vision backbones pretrained on natural images to the distinct temporal semantics of time-series images. To address these challenges, we propose MUSE, a dependency-aware adaptation framework built on a fully frozen pretrained MAE. First, the Variable Context Refinement Module (VCR) aggregates shared temporal information within each variable and models cross-variable contextual dependencies while preserving independent visual spaces. Second, the Temporal-Periodic Refinement Module (TPR) performs lightweight refinement at different encoder depths and explicitly models across-period temporal dependencies and within-period periodic dependencies. The two modules independently produce forecasts, which are fused through a learnable prediction-level gate. Experiments on 10 real-world datasets demonstrate that MUSE achieves state-of-the-art performance.