One-for-All: A Lightweight Stabilized and Parameter-Efficient Pre-trained LLM for Time Series Forecasting

TL;DR

The paper introduces One-for-All, a parameter-efficient, stable, and lightweight LLM adaptation method for time series forecasting, achieving state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy trade-offs and enabling edge deployment.

Contribution

It proposes rsLoRA, a mathematically grounded rank-stabilization mechanism for low-rank adapters, reducing parameters and memory while maintaining accuracy.

Findings

Achieves 5.5× higher parameter efficiency than TimesNet.

Matches forecasting accuracy of larger models like GPT4TS.

Reduces memory footprint by up to 1776×.

Abstract

We address the challenge of adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for multivariate time-series analysis, where their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational and memory demands. Our solution, One-for-All, introduces Gaussian Rank-Stabilized Low-Rank Adapters (rsLoRA) to enable parameter-efficient fine-tuning of frozen LLMs. While inspired by LoRA, rsLoRA introduces a mathematically grounded rank-stabilization mechanism that enables provable gradient stability at low ranks a novel contribution absent in prior PEFT methods. Our framework injects trainable rank decomposition matrices (rank 16) into positional embeddings and output layers, while keeping self-attention weights fixed. This design reduces trainable parameters by 6.8$\times$ (vs. TimesNet), 21$\times$ (vs. GPT4TS), and 11.8$\times$ (vs. TIME-LLM), while achieving a 168-1,776$\times$ smaller memory footprint (2.2MiB vs. 340MiB-4.18GiB in SOTA models). Rigorous evaluation across six time-series tasks demonstrates that One-for-All achieves state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy trade-offs: 5.5$\times$ higher parameter efficiency (MSE=5.50) than TimesNet and 21$\times$ better than GPT4TS, while matching their forecasting accuracy (MSE=0.33). The framework's stability is validated through consistent performance across diverse horizons (96-720 steps) and datasets (ETT, Weather, M3, M4), with 98.3% fewer parameters than conventional transformers. These advances enable deployment on edge devices for healthcare, finance, and environmental monitoring without compromising performance.