Recent Advances in Time Series Foundation Models (BERT2S)
Workshop at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025
The NeurIPS workshop on Recent Advances on Time Series Foundation Models: Have We Reached the BERT Moment? will be held at the San Diego Convention Center on December 6, 2025. A hackathon will be organized shortly after the workshop to foster the development of benchmarks and applications where TSFMs can truly shine. Details will be provided in time. We look forward to welcoming you to San Diego.
Location: San Diego Convention Center
Date: Saturday 6th December 2025
Introduction
Foundation models (FMs) have achieved great success in NLP and vision, inspiring over 20 new time series FMs (TSFMs) in the past year. Despite promising results, studies show that carefully designed lightweight supervised baselines often match TSFM performance. Unlike NLP’s “BERT Moment,” TSFMs still require full fine-tuning to be competitive in real-world scenarios. Additionally, some tabular FMs rival TSFMs without being time series-specific. Recent benchmarks also provide mixed evidence: GIFT-Eval favors TSFMs, OpenTS shows statistical models outperforming deep learning on univariate data, and FoundTS finds supervised baselines on par with TSFMs. This workshop aims to bring together researchers to examine the gap between TSFM potential and real-world utility, and to identify benchmarks and applications where TSFMs can truly excel.
The key topics of this workshop include, but are not limited to:
- Benchmarking Foundation Models in Time Series,
- Scaling Laws and Efficiency in Time Series Models,
- Evaluating Transferability and Adaptability of Foundation Models,
- Leveraging Foundation Models of Other Modalities for Time Series,
- Unsupervised performance estimation of TSFMs,
- Industrial Benchmarking of Time Series Foundation Models
More details are provided in our Call for Papers.
Schedule
Saturday 7th December 2025, Meeting Room XX, San Diego Convention Center
This is a tentative schedule subject to change. Please take a look at the NeurIPS website for the detailed schedule.
| Time (PST) | Event |
|---|---|
| 9:30 - 09:45 | 🥁 Welcome and introduction |
| 9:45 - 10:15 | 📢 Invited Talk by Ameet Talwalkar TSFMs Struggle to Beat Supervised Baselines |
| 10:20 - 10:50 | 📢 Invited Talk by Mingsheng Long BERT-Style Foundation Model for Time Series Understanding |
| 10:50 - 11:05 | ☕ Coffee & Networking Break |
| 11:10 - 11:25 | 🎤 Contributed Spotlight Talk - TBD |
| 11:25 - 11:40 | 🎤 Contributed Spotlight Talk - TBD |
| 11:40 - 12:40 | 📑 Poster Session 1 |
| 12:40 - 13:40 | 🦞 Lunch Break |
| 13:45 - 14:15 | 📢 Invited Talk by Danielle M. Robinson Foundation Models and Benchmarks with Chronos and GluonTS |
| 14:20 - 14:50 | 📢 Invited Talk by Zoe Piran Temporal Dynamics of Single-Cell Co-Essay Data |
| 14:50 - 15:05 | ☕ Coffee & Networking Break |
| 15:05 - 15:55 | 🎓 Pannel Discussion (Danielle M. Robinson, Chenghao Liu, Qingsong Wen, Ameet Talwalkar) |
| 15:55 - 16:10 | ☕ Coffee & Networking Break |
| 16:10 - 16:25 | 🎤 Contributed Spotlight Talk - TBD |
| 16:25 - 16:40 | 🎤 Contributed Spotlight Talk - TBD |
| 16:40 - 17:40 | 📑 Poster Session 2 |
| 17:40 - 17:55 | 🎬 Concluding Remarks & Hackaton Ad |
| 19:00 - 22:00 | 🍻 Social Event |
Contact
If you have questions, you can contact Thomas Moreau and Ievgen Redko or send an email to berts2025.workshop@gmail.com.