aiqbench analysis
This paper proposes GateFormer, a vision transformer that fuses sky-image patches with recent solar irradiance readings and uses two output heads, one predicting the full trajectory and one predicting the final change, combined through learned weights. The reported gains are about 9.6% lower RMSE than a transformer baseline on one benchmark, but the evaluation is limited to three sites and a single 30-minute horizon, so generalization remains to be shown. For ML readers, the transferable idea is forecast-space decomposition with adaptive combination, not the solar application itself.
GateFormer: Forecast-Space Decomposition for Intra-Hour Solar Irradiance Prediction from Sky Images
arXiv:2610.30942v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sub-hourly dispatch, balancing, and storage control increasingly depend on forecasts that anticipate rapid variability in solar generation. Accurate sky-image-based irradiance forecasting requires a combination of visual cloud dynamics with recent irradiance state while adapting to different short-term irradiance-change regimes. To address this, we introduce GateFormer, a GHI-conditioned dual-decoder ViT for intra-hour global horizontal irradiance (GHI) forecasting through forecast-space decomposition. GateFormer embeds observed GHI into the visual token stream, allowing interaction with sky-image patch features through self-attention. From this shared representation, a Trajectory Head predicts future GHI sequence, while a Delta Head predicts final-horizon change from the latest observed GHI. The two final-horizon forecasts are adaptively weighted in prediction space, with magnitude- and direction-supervision targeting the remaining error. On the NREL-TSI benchmark, GateFormer attains 125.01 W/m^2 RMSE at +30 min, improving over a state-of-the-art transformer baseline by 9.6% under paired-timestamp evaluation. Across NREL-TSI, Chilbolton, and SIRTA, GateFormer achieves the lowest final-horizon RMSE among the evaluated baselines, with forecast skill of 22.97-28.86% relative to smart persistence. Component ablations show adaptive weighting outperforms both individual decoders and fixed averaging, distinguishing GateFormer from conventional forecast combination, while the supervised correction further reduces RMSE by 1.68 W/m^2 and MAE by 4.86 W/m^2. Ramp-regime diagnostics show larger gains during operationally important positive ramps, reducing RMSE by 26.27 W/m^2. These results identify forecast-space decomposition as an alternative forecasting formulation, with potential relevance to other multimodal short-horizon forecasting tasks and deployment using only sky images and measured GHI.
Abstract:Sub-hourly dispatch, balancing, and storage control increasingly depend on forecasts that anticipate rapid variability in solar generation. Accurate sky-image-based irradiance forecasting requires a combination of visual cloud dynamics with recent irradiance state while adapting to different short-term irradiance-change regimes. To address this, we introduce GateFormer, a GHI-conditioned dual-decoder ViT for intra-hour global horizontal irradiance (GHI) forecasting through forecast-space decomposition. GateFormer embeds observed GHI into the visual token stream, allowing interaction with sky-image patch features through self-attention. From this shared representation, a Trajectory Head predicts future GHI sequence, while a Delta Head predicts final-horizon change from the latest observed GHI. The two final-horizon forecasts are adaptively weighted in prediction space, with magnitude- and direction-supervision targeting the remaining error. On the NREL-TSI benchmark, GateFormer attains 125.01 W/m^2 RMSE at +30 min, improving over a state-of-the-art transformer baseline by 9.6% under paired-timestamp evaluation. Across NREL-TSI, Chilbolton, and SIRTA, GateFormer achieves the lowest final-horizon RMSE among the evaluated baselines, with forecast skill of 22.97-28.86% relative to smart persistence. Component ablations show adaptive weighting outperforms both individual decoders and fixed averaging, distinguishing GateFormer from conventional forecast combination, while the supervised correction further reduces RMSE by 1.68 W/m^2 and MAE by 4.86 W/m^2. Ramp-regime diagnostics show larger gains during operationally important positive ramps, reducing RMSE by 26.27 W/m^2. These results identify forecast-space decomposition as an alternative forecasting formulation, with potential relevance to other multimodal short-horizon forecasting tasks and deployment using only sky images and measured GHI.
Image and Video Processing (eess.IV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2610.30942 [eess.IV]
(or arXiv:2610.30942v1 [eess.IV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.30942 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyai.2026.100917 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources
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