Foundation Models for Event Prediction Across Heterogeneous Event Logs

Fabian Spaeh, Sean Jaffe, Shandian Zhe, Bin Shen

Event logs are ubiquitous across real-world domains, including business processes, manufacturing workflows, healthcare, and many other operational systems. Yet event logs can differ substantially in their event semantics, label spaces, interaction patterns, and temporal scales, making it difficult to build a single foundation model that generalizes directly to previously unseen systems. We address this challenge with the Foundation Event Predictor (FEP), a simple and scalable in-context architecture that performs next-event prediction through learned, event-level nonparametric inference. Causal self-attention encodes context and target histories into key and query representations, respectively, while the observed next context events are encoded as values. Cross-attention then performs learned, relevance-weighted aggregation of next-event outcomes over all context transitions, allowing the entire nonparametric prediction procedure to be expressed as standard attention operations and efficiently parallelized with modern kernels such as FlashAttention. To promote cross-system generalization, we introduce permutation-robust embedding learning and random fixed embeddings to decouple…