aiqbench analysis
The paper applies foundation-model-style pretraining to distributed solar power forecasting, framing forecasts as sequence completion across many stations and horizons. Its most useful finding for ML readers is that a mixed pretraining objective, which blends forecast-aligned and random sequence reconstruction, gave the most balanced results, including zero-shot transfer to 139 held-out stations. The evidence is limited to one dataset and to comparisons with specific baselines, so the claims about generalization should be checked against other grids and climates before being relied on.
Foundation-Style Pretraining for Scalable and Transferable Distributed PV Forecasting
arXiv:2610.27763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid growth of distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation is increasing the demand for accurate forecasting across large numbers of geographically dispersed stations. Existing approaches are commonly developed for individual sites or specific forecasting horizons, requiring repeated training and maintenance as new stations are integrated and limiting direct reuse at previously unseen sites. To address this scalability gap, this paper presents a domain-specific foundation-style pretraining framework that learns a shared forecasting model from heterogeneous multi-site and multi-horizon PV data. NWP-assisted forecasting is formulated as a sequence-completion problem that unifies historical PV power, meteorological observations, future numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecasts, and time encodings. Three pretraining objectives are designed and systematically evaluated, including forecast-aligned reconstruction, generic reconstruction, and mixed reconstruction. The mixed objective combines the operational structure of PV forecasting with random sequence reconstruction and provides the most balanced performance across forecasting accuracy, degraded NWP conditions, and downstream adaptation. Experiments on 479 distributed PV stations use 340 stations for model development and 139 spatially held-out stations for zero-shot evaluation. Across horizons from 6 hours to 7 days, the multi-site pretrained MR model outperforms representative station-specific and shared baselines, as well as generalist time-series models, including a recent large-scale pretrained foundation model. The pretrained model can also be directly deployed at new PV stations and subsequently adapted to region-specific operational objectives when local data become available, providing a scalable forecasting paradigm for large distributed PV fleets.
Abstract:The rapid growth of distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation is increasing the demand for accurate forecasting across large numbers of geographically dispersed stations. Existing approaches are commonly developed for individual sites or specific forecasting horizons, requiring repeated training and maintenance as new stations are integrated and limiting direct reuse at previously unseen sites. To address this scalability gap, this paper presents a domain-specific foundation-style pretraining framework that learns a shared forecasting model from heterogeneous multi-site and multi-horizon PV data. NWP-assisted forecasting is formulated as a sequence-completion problem that unifies historical PV power, meteorological observations, future numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecasts, and time encodings. Three pretraining objectives are designed and systematically evaluated, including forecast-aligned reconstruction, generic reconstruction, and mixed reconstruction. The mixed objective combines the operational structure of PV forecasting with random sequence reconstruction and provides the most balanced performance across forecasting accuracy, degraded NWP conditions, and downstream adaptation. Experiments on 479 distributed PV stations use 340 stations for model development and 139 spatially held-out stations for zero-shot evaluation. Across horizons from 6 hours to 7 days, the multi-site pretrained MR model outperforms representative station-specific and shared baselines, as well as generalist time-series models, including a recent large-scale pretrained foundation model. The pretrained model can also be directly deployed at new PV stations and subsequently adapted to region-specific operational objectives when local data become available, providing a scalable forecasting paradigm for large distributed PV fleets.
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2610.27763 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.27763v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.27763 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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