TiVaT: A Transformer with a Single Unified Mechanism for Capturing Asynchronous Dependencies in Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract: Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting is vital across various domains but remains challenging due to the need to simultaneously model temporal and inter-variate dependencies. Existing channel-dependent models, where Transformer-based models dominate, process these dependencies separately, limiting their capacity to capture complex interactions such as lead-lag dynamics. To address this issue, we propose TiVaT (Time-variate Transformer), a novel architecture incorporating a single unified module, a Joint-Axis (JA) attention module, that concurrently processes temporal and variate modeling. The JA attention module dynamically selects relevant features to particularly capture asynchronous interactions. In addition, we introduce distance-aware time-variate sampling in the JA attention, a novel mechanism that extracts significant patterns through a learned 2D embedding space while reducing noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate TiVaT's overall performance across diverse datasets, particularly excelling in scenarios with intricate asynchronous dependencies.