Unified Transferability Metrics for Time Series Foundation Models

Weiyang Zhang, Xinyang Chen, Xiucheng Li, Kehai Chen, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

With the increasing number of time series pre-trained models, designing transferability evaluation metrics for time series has become an urgent problem to address. While transferability evaluation has been extensively studied in computer vision, we aim to address a critical gap by developing tailored metrics for time series analysis. In this paper, we introduce TEMPLATE, a transferability estimation framework specifically tailored for versatile time series analysis, comprising three complementary metrics: (1) Dependency Learning Score quantifies a model’s capacity to capture temporal dependencies. (2) Pattern Learning Score evaluates the representation quality in extracting discriminative temporal patterns. (3) Task Adaptation Score assesses cross-task generalization capability, enabling versatile time series analysis. TEMPLATE presents a versatile framework compatible with both classification and regression paradigms. Through comprehensive benchmarking across 5 distinct downstream tasks, our method demonstrates superior capability in identifying optimal pre-trained models from heterogeneous model pools for transfer learning. Compared to the state-of-the-art method ETran, our approach improves the weighted Kendall's $\tau_w$ across 5 downstream tasks by 35\%. The code is available at https://github.com/ooooooover/TEMPLATE.