Squeezing Time: How Dynamic Tokenization Could Reshape Time‑Series Foundation Models
Forecasting systems have a bad habit: they treat every moment in the past as if it deserves the same amount of attention. A quiet hour in an electricity-load curve. A sudden machine vibration spike. A slowly drifting weather signal. A crypto candle that does nothing for three hours and then ruins someone’s afternoon. To a standard point-wise time-series model, each timestamp is a token. To a fixed-patch model, every group of timestamps is compressed with the same ruler. Both choices are defensible. Both are also slightly lazy. ...