KALEIDO: Input-Space Adaptation of a Vision Model for Time-Series Forecasting Through Gated Fold Geometries

Time-series foundation models buy zero-shot forecasting with large temporal corpora; a vision model needs none, since a natural image implicitly embeds the patterns a forecaster must model, and an ImageNet-pretrained masked autoencoder forecasts a series by inpainting a rendering of it. A rendered series is not a natural image, however, and closing that gap takes temporal-aware adaptation. We show that the rendering geometry - how the series is folded and drawn - is a controllable, mixable axis for it. Kaleido detects the dominant periods, renders a rule-generated set of fold geometries, combines the inpaintings with a convex per-position gate fit on validation only, and fuses the result with the zero-shot output at one fixed share, with no per-dataset hyperparameter beyond the baseline's published settings. Training only LayerNorm (0.05%), Kaleido lowers MSE by 13% against the published zero-shot baseline on LTSF and, frozen, by 6.6%; on GIFT-Eval it improves the baseline by 7.4% in MASE and 19.3% in CRPS.