REVIEW 5 major objections 6 minor 1 cited by
Zero Shot Time Series Forecasting Using Kolmogorov Arnold Networks
T0 review · 5 major / 6 minor · reviewed 2026-08-11 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read The paper proposes that a doubly residual N-BEATS network built on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks and trained with adversarial domain adaptation can forecast day-ahead electricity prices for an unseen market, reporting 13% and 24% lower error…
desk verdict Plausible architecture, unconvincing evidence: the zero-shot gains aren't established because the evaluation has temporal leakage and missing statistics. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is a doubly residual KAN stack: a sequence of blocks, each a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network whose edge operations are learnable univariate B-spline functions, wired together with backcast residuals and hierarchical forecast aggregation in the style of N-BEATS. Around this backbone, a gradient reversal layer implements the adversarial game between the price forecaster and a domain classifier, forcing the early representation to hide which source market produced a sample while later layers keep market-specific detail. This combined structure is what the paper claims generates domain-invariant features, and it is the mechanism by which the zero-shot transfer is supposed to happen.
What would settle it
Inspect the Bayesian optimization logs and training configuration: if any Nord Pool 2018 prices were passed to hyperparameter search, or if the reported model was chosen after looking at Nord Pool test errors, the zero-shot claim collapses. A cleaner test is to truncate every training market before 2018, fix hyperparameters using only pre-2018 data, and rerun; if the 13% and 24% margins vanish, the central claim fails.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that replacing the MLP blocks of N-BEATS with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks and adding a gradient-reversal domain classifier to the training objective yields representations that transfer to a market excluded from training. In the reported experiments, the proposed model reaches a mean absolute error around 2.51 and a symmetric MAPE around 0.086 on the Nord Pool 2018 test year, regardless of which of the three source markets is treated as primary; the best N-BEATS and KAN baselines are higher on both metrics. The authors state this is an improvement of roughly 13% over N-BEATS and 24% over KAN, and that the adversarial framework learns market-invariant representations.
Load-bearing premise
The result depends on the target market's data never entering training or model selection; the paper does not specify which data the Bayesian optimizer saw, and the PJM training set runs through the same calendar year as the Nord Pool test period.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- A market operator opening in a new region could issue day-ahead forecasts on day one, using only price histories from established markets.
- The reported 13% and 24% error reductions imply that, among the architectures tested, the KAN-based adversarial backbone is the better default for cross-market zero-shot forecasting.
- The zero-shot errors sit in the same order of magnitude as published supervised results with NBEATSx, so the approach could substitute for local training when target-market data are unavailable.
- Because the KAN layers learn smooth B-spline curves, forecasts come with a visual account of the functional shapes the model uses, which is not available from opaque large models.
Reading between the lines
- Ablating the gradient reversal layer while keeping the KAN backbone would show whether the domain-adversarial term, rather than the spline architecture alone, causes the zero-shot gain; the paper does not report that comparison.
- The current model ingests only the price series, so a testable extension is to add exogenous drivers such as temperature or load forecasts to the KAN inputs, which the spline activations can accommodate without a change in the adversarial objective.
- The paper trains with one primary and one secondary market per run; a natural extension is to feed several secondary markets through the same domain classifier, since the objective only requires a domain label per sample.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes a zero-shot time series forecasting model for day-ahead electricity prices that combines Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) with a doubly residual N-BEATS-like architecture and an adversarial domain adaptation mechanism using a gradient reversal layer. The model is trained on two of three source markets (PJM, EPEX France, EPEX Belgium) and tested on the unseen Nord Pool market. The authors report MAE and SMAPE comparisons against standard KAN and N-BEATS baselines, claiming approximately 13% and 24% improvements in accuracy. The theoretical framework is described in Appendix A, with additional appendices on zero-shot learning and evaluation metrics.
Significance. If the results were properly validated, the paper would make a useful contribution: combining KANs with the N-BEATS residual stacking is a natural and relatively new idea, and demonstrating zero-shot transfer across electricity markets would have practical value for forecasting in markets with scarce historical data. The paper also correctly identifies the need for domain-invariant representations. However, the significance is severely weakened by the current form of the manuscript: the formal framework contains a fundamental error, the empirical evaluation is missing essential methodological detail, and the main performance claim is not supported by appropriate statistics. The reader cannot currently verify the central zero-shot claim, so the contributions remain at the level of an interesting proposal rather than a validated result.
major comments (5)
- [Appendix A.1] Equation (1) defines the target risk as R_Mt(F) = P(F(X) ≠ Y), which is a classification error (0-1 loss). For the regression problem at hand, where Y is a continuous electricity price, the event F(X) ≠ Y essentially always occurs, making this quantity identically 1 and uninformative. The formal framework should instead minimize an expected loss E_{(x,y)∼P_Mt}[L(F(x), y)] for a suitable regression loss L (e.g., MAE or SMAPE). This is not a stylistic slip: the adversarial training justification in the same appendix is expressed in terms of this mis-specified risk, and as written it does not describe the actual optimization objective used in the experiments.
- [Section 4] The zero-shot protocol is not verifiable. The paper states that hyperparameters 'are optimized using a Bayesian optimization method' with a tree-structured Parzen estimator, but it never states which data were used for selection. The PJM training set extends to 24 December 2018, which is the same calendar period as the Nord Pool test set (1 January 2018 to 24 December 2018). If any part of the tuning procedure used data from that overlapping period, information about the target market could have influenced model selection, breaking the zero-shot claim. The authors must specify the exact data split used for hyperparameter optimization, report the tuned hyperparameter values, and confirm that no target-market data or same-period source data were used for model selection.
- [Table 1] The baseline KAN and N-BEATS results are reported as single point values with no error bars, while only the proposed model is shown with ± intervals. The number of independent runs is not stated, and no statistical significance tests are performed. Consequently, the claimed improvement of 'around 13% and 24%' is not supported by the reported evidence. The authors should report means and standard deviations over multiple seeds for all models, state the number of runs, and apply an appropriate paired test (e.g., Diebold-Mariano or bootstrap) to the forecast errors to demonstrate that the differences are not due to noise.
- [Section 2 and Appendix A.1] The central claim that the adversarial framework 'learns market-invariant representations' is not empirically verified. There is no experiment showing that the domain classifier is actually confused, no comparison to a non-adversarial version of the same backbone, and no ablation varying the gradient reversal strength or architecture. Without such experiments, the observed error differences cannot be attributed to the adversarial mechanism; they could be due entirely to the KAN-based residual backbone. The authors should add an ablation and report the domain classifier accuracy on held-out source data to demonstrate that invariance is achieved.
- [Section 4] The experimental protocol is under-specified. The sentence 'The values are averaged over different models, each time with a different market as the secondary market' is ambiguous: for each primary market there are two remaining source markets, so it is unclear whether the reported numbers are averages over two models (one per secondary market) or over a different number of configurations, and whether the secondary markets were used individually or jointly. The authors must clarify the number of models averaged, the exact training configurations, and how the reported error bars were computed.
minor comments (6)
- [Appendix B] The entire appendix on 'Zero Shot Learning with attributes' discusses class-attribute matrices and seen classes, which has no connection to the time series forecasting problem addressed in this paper. It appears to be leftover material from a different manuscript and should be removed or substantially rewritten to discuss domain adaptation for regression.
- [Appendix B.1] In Equation (7), there is a typo: 'l(h(x, y' should be 'l(h(x,y))'. The covariate shift derivation is also not used elsewhere in the paper; if it is kept, it should be explicitly connected to the proposed method.
- [Section 4] The phrase 'We observe an improvement of around 13% and 24% in accuracy' is imprecise: the percentages should be computed directly from the table values, the baselines should be named, and 'accuracy' is a misnomer for regression error metrics.
- [Figure 2] The caption reads 'The next day forecast presents a comparison' and is awkwardly worded. More importantly, a single qualitative example is not evidence of systematic performance; the quantitative results in Table 1 are the relevant evidence.
- [Appendix A.2] Equation (2) uses the notation 'N Ni,j(yb i,j−1, Xb−1)' without defining Xb−1 or clarifying the indexing of the backcast input. All symbols should be defined to make the architecture reproducible.
- [Abstract] The phrase 'This addition not only enriches the model's representational capacity' is vague; the abstract would be clearer if it stated the architecture components explicitly.
Circularity Check
No circularity: the paper's central claims are empirical and rest on an architecture composed of externally cited components; no prediction reduces to a fitted parameter or self-citation.
full rationale
The paper's derivation chain does not contain a circular step of the kind that would force a predicted quantity to equal its input by construction. The proposed model is a combination of KAN layers (cited from external prior work) and the N-BEATS doubly residual stacking principle (also external). No step in the derivation defines the model in terms of the target Nord Pool labels, nor does any fitted parameter get renamed as a zero-shot prediction. The adversarial domain adaptation objective (Appendix A.1, Eq. 1) is formally mis-specified: it defines the target risk as P(F(X) != Y), which is a classification risk for a regression task with continuous Y. This is a correctness and clarity flaw, not a circularity, because the actual training and evaluation use regression losses (MAE/SMAPE) and the reported numbers are not equal to Eq. 1 by construction. Similarly, the use of Bayesian optimization is not described in terms of which data were used for hyperparameter selection; if the target market's test period informed model selection, the zero-shot protocol would be compromised. That would be data leakage/protocol invalidity, not circularity, because the model's output is not a mathematical restatement of the tuning target. The paper cites no prior work by the same authors as load-bearing evidence, and no uniqueness theorem is imported from the authors' own publications. The performance comparison against standard KAN and N-BEATS baselines is an external empirical benchmark, so the central claim retains independent content. Thus, under the specified criteria, the honest finding is that there is no significant circularity.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (1)
- Model hyperparameters (number of stacks, blocks, hidden units, spline order, learning rate, etc.) =
not reported
assumptions (3)
- standard math Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem
- domain assumption Adversarial domain-invariance via gradient reversal produces domain-invariant features
- ad hoc to paper Covariate shift assumption S(y|x) = T(y|x) for reweighting
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Zero Shot Time Series Forecasting Using Kolmogorov Arnold Networks." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/SDD5L24C
@misc{pith2026241217853,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Zero Shot Time Series Forecasting Using Kolmogorov Arnold Networks},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/SDD5L24C}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2412.17853}
}
read the original abstract
Accurate energy price forecasting is crucial for participants in day-ahead energy markets, as it significantly influences their decision-making processes. While machine learning-based approaches have shown promise in enhancing these forecasts, they often remain confined to the specific markets on which they are trained, thereby limiting their adaptability to new or unseen markets. In this paper, we introduce a cross-domain adaptation model designed to forecast energy prices by learning market-invariant representations across different markets during the training phase. We propose a doubly residual N-BEATS network with Kolmogorov Arnold networks at its core for time series forecasting. These networks, grounded in the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, offer a powerful way to approximate multivariate continuous functions. The cross domain adaptation model was generated with an adversarial framework. The model's effectiveness was tested in predicting day-ahead electricity prices in a zero shot fashion. In comparison with baseline models, our proposed framework shows promising results. By leveraging the Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, our model can potentially enhance its ability to capture complex patterns in energy price data, thus improving forecast accuracy across diverse market conditions. This addition not only enriches the model's representational capacity but also contributes to a more robust and flexible forecasting tool adaptable to various energy markets.
Figures
Forward citations
Cited by 1 Pith paper
-
TFKAN: Time-Frequency KAN for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
TFKAN places Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks directly on FFT coefficients alongside a time-domain KAN branch, improving long-term forecast accuracy on seven benchmark datasets.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
@esa ( ) , n @biblabelnum##1 ##1
\@ifclassloaded aguplus natbib The aguplus class already includes natbib coding, so you should not add it explicitly Type <Return> for now, but then later remove the command natbib from the document \@ifclassloaded nlinproc natbib The nlinproc class already includes natbib coding, so you should not add it explicitly Type <Return> for now, but then later r...
-
[2]
@stdbsttrue NAT@ctr \@lbibitem[ NAT@ctr ] \@lbibitem[#1]#2 \@extra@b@citeb \@ifundefined br@#2\@extra@b@citeb \@namedef br@#2 \@nameuse br@#2\@extra@b@citeb \@ifundefined b@#2\@extra@b@citeb @num @parse #2 [ @natanchorstart #2\@extra@b@citeb \@biblabel @num @natanchorend] @ifcmd#1()()\@nil #2 @lbibitem\@undefined @lbibitem\@lbibitem \@lbibitem[#1]#2 @lbib...
-
[3]
>8q /R3ω 8'N;> H sEAmo h>rey.G]`ڦ' 崋pɸ/.wʶm sڦ,
@open @close @open @close and [1] URL: #1 \@ifundefined chapter * \@mkboth \@ifundefined NAT@sectionbib * \@mkboth * \@mkboth\@gobbletwo \@ifclassloaded amsart * \@ifclassloaded amsbook * \@ifundefined bib@heading @heading NAT@ctr thebibliography [1] @ \@biblabel NAT@ctr \@bibsetup #1 NAT@ctr 0 @openbib .11em \@plus.33em \@minus.07em 4000 4000 `\.=1000 \@...
work page 2024
-
[4]
Time series forecasting model based on domain adaptation and shared attention
Yuan Li, Jingwei Li, Chengbao Liu, and Jie Tan. Time series forecasting model based on domain adaptation and shared attention. In International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems , pages 215--225. Springer, 2023
work page 2023
-
[5]
N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting
Boris N Oreshkin, Dmitri Carpov, Nicolas Chapados, and Yoshua Bengio. N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting . arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.10437 , 2019
arXiv 1905
-
[6]
KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
Ziming Liu, Yixuan Wang, Sachin Vaidya, Fabian Ruehle, James Halverson, Marin Solja c i \'c , Thomas Y Hou, and Max Tegmark. KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks . arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19756 , 2024
arXiv 2024
-
[7]
Domain-adversarial training of neural networks
Yaroslav Ganin, Evgeniya Ustinova, Hana Ajakan, Pascal Germain, Hugo Larochelle, Fran c ois Laviolette, Mario Marchand, and Victor Lempitsky. Domain-adversarial training of neural networks . The journal of machine learning research , 17(1):2096--2030, 2016
work page 2016
-
[8]
Hyperopt: A python library for optimizing the hyperparameters of machine learning algorithms
James Bergstra, Dan Yamins, David D Cox, et al. Hyperopt: A python library for optimizing the hyperparameters of machine learning algorithms. In Proceedings of the 12th Python in science conference , volume 13, page 20. Citeseer, 2013
work page 2013
Show all 13 references
-
[9]
Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) for time series analysis
Cristian J Vaca-Rubio, Luis Blanco, Roberto Pereira, and M \`a rius Caus. Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) for time series analysis . arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.08790 , 2024
2024
-
[10]
Neural basis expansion analysis with exogenous variables: Forecasting electricity prices with NBEATSx
Kin G Olivares, Cristian Challu, Grzegorz Marcjasz, Rafa Weron, and Artur Dubrawski. Neural basis expansion analysis with exogenous variables: Forecasting electricity prices with NBEATSx . International Journal of Forecasting , 39(2):884--900, 2023
2023
-
[11]
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Time Series: Bridging Predictive Power and Interpretability
Kunpeng Xu, Lifei Chen, and Shengrui Wang. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Time Series: Bridging Predictive Power and Interpretability . arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.02496 , 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[12]
Analysis of representations for domain adaptation
Shai Ben-David, John Blitzer, Koby Crammer, and Fernando Pereira. Analysis of representations for domain adaptation. Advances in neural information processing systems , 19, 2006
2006
-
[13]
Another look at measures of forecast accuracy
Rob J Hyndman and Anne B Koehler. Another look at measures of forecast accuracy. International journal of forecasting , 22(4):679--688, 2006
2006
Reviewed August 11, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.