A Unified Scaling Law for Time Series Foundation Models

Xilin Dai, Yiding Liu, Zewei Dong, Jiang-Ming Yang, Qiang Xu

We develop a Unified Scaling Law and a Unified Theory of Time Series Learning to understand how model capacity and historical information support forecasting. Across different lookback lengths and forecast horizons, we analyze 18,768 experimental cells from 21 checkpoints on 23 dataset-frequency tasks spanning six domains. Our empirical methodology integrates local resource relations into a parsimonious, fitted five-parameter law: capacity gains increase with history, context gains diminish toward saturation, and horizon effects enter as a common shift. Fitted without Toto 2.0, the law predicts its horizon-averaged capacity-scaling curves with mean absolute percentage errors of 1.09% and 1.50% at input lengths 2048 and 4096. To understand how history supports prediction, our learning theory uses Gaussian regression to analyze rule identification and predictive capability. We hypothesize that full-shot models learn by accumulating information in weights, while frozen time series foundation models (TSFMs) use history by extracting information through activations. Matched-history comparisons establish the predictive value of additional history. Controlled parameter exchanges and…