TIMBRE: Teaching Time Series Forecasters to Read, Remember, and Reconcile
Xinyu Guan, Zhirong Zhang, Hongyuan Liu, Pengcheng Xu, Yu Sun, Chen Song, Qianyang Zhao
Abstract
Event-informed forecasting requires translating reports and historical responses into changes to a numerical forecast. We propose TIMBRE (Temporal Integration of Memory-Based Responses and Evidence), which combines source-aware representation, state-conditioned response transfer, and reliability-guided fusion before a frozen forecast head. A separate readout adjusts interval widths while preserving the median. In a single-seed, one-epoch development study of 13 tasks, TIMBRE improves MAE over ordinary fusion on eight tasks but over native Chronos-2 on only two. Disabling response transfer in the trained model reduces BTC and AULF MAE by 47.04% and 6.81%, respectively. These findings identify sensitivity to learned response transfer rather than a general forecasting advantage. Missing development-set scores and the absence of retrained ablations limit attribution to individual evidence mechanisms.