Our new X account is live! Follow @wizwand_team for updates
WorkDL logo mark

Closing the Loop: A Control-Theoretic Framework for Provably Stable Time Series Forecasting with LLMs

About

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown exceptional potential in time series forecasting, leveraging their inherent sequential reasoning capabilities to model complex temporal dynamics. However, existing approaches typically employ a naive autoregressive generation strategy. We identify a critical theoretical flaw in this paradigm: during inference, the model operates in an open-loop manner, consuming its own generated outputs recursively. This leads to inevitable error accumulation (exposure bias), where minor early deviations cascade into significant trajectory drift over long horizons. In this paper, we reformulate autoregressive forecasting through the lens of control theory, proposing \textbf{F-LLM} (Feedback-driven LLM), a novel closed-loop framework. Unlike standard methods that passively propagate errors, F-LLM actively stabilizes the trajectory via a learnable residual estimator (Observer) and a feedback controller. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical guarantee that our closed-loop mechanism ensures uniformly bounded error, provided the base model satisfies a local Lipschitz constraint. Extensive experiments demonstrate that F-LLM significantly mitigates error propagation, achieving good performance on time series benchmarks.

Xingyu Zhang, Hanyun Du, Zeen Song, Jianqi Zhang, Changwen Zheng, Wenwen Qiang• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Long-term time-series forecastingETTh1
MAE0.405
351
Long-term time-series forecastingWeather
MSE0.215
348
Long-term time-series forecastingETTh2
MSE0.317
327
Long-term time-series forecastingETTm2
MSE0.234
305
Long-term time-series forecastingETTm1
MSE0.319
295
Long-term time-series forecastingTraffic
MSE0.364
278
Long-term time-series forecastingECL
MSE0.148
134
Short-term forecastingM4 Quarterly--
67
Short-term forecastingM4 Yearly--
63
Short-term forecastingM4 Monthly
SMAPE14.535
61
Showing 10 of 14 rows

Other info

Follow for update