Managing massive crowds during infrequent special events requires reliable real-time pedestrian-flow forecasting to ensure public safety and operational efficiency. However, supervised forecasting methods face limitations in these contexts due to scarce historical data, heterogeneous data distributions, and short in-event observation windows. To effectively support operational decision-making, forecasts should provide not only accurate point estimates but also informative predictive uncertainty. Probabilistic uncertainty quantification plays a critical role in this aspect, particularly capturing sudden volatility and tail risks. This paper investigates pretrained time series foundation models as a lightweight approach for zero-shot probabilistic forecasting without extensive local retraining. Using decision-oriented metrics tailored to short events, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of two time series foundation models on crowd forecasting, with the SAIL2025 event as a use case. We then distill practical insights for crowd managers, specifying when zero-shot forecasts remain operationally reliable.
Forecasting multiple time-series with high-dimensional covariates presents a core challenge: unifying common temporal patterns while retaining meaningful series-specific information. We introduce Hopformer (Homogeneity-Pursuit Transformer), a two-stage framework that addresses th…
The modeling of hydrometeorological time series with limited observations is a key challenge in the monitoring of hydro-systems and water resources, as well as for flood or drought risk assessment. Due to the high variability of the underlying processes and the sparsity of availa…
With the ever-increasing pervasiveness of smart edge devices, the demand is growing for applications that can be tailored to users (e.g., custom keyword spotting) or patients (e.g., adaptive health monitoring). Yet, most edge devices rely on fixed inference algorithms and thus ca…
Large-scale multivariate time series from heterogeneous IoT sensors demand accurate long-term forecasting for resource scheduling and predictive maintenance. While recent time series foundation models exhibit strong generalization, they rely on static parametric knowledge and lac…
Accurately modeling cross-variate dependencies remains a key challenge in multivariate time series forecasting, particularly in the presence of strong periodic patterns. Many existing approaches rely on attention-based mechanisms that incur quadratic complexity and scale poorly w…
Weather forecasting foundation models (FMs) are increasingly fine-tuned to predict air quality, offering fast global pollution forecasts at lower computational cost than conventional chemical transport models. These FMs are typically trained on reanalysis data and generate foreca…