TinyCast

Probabilistic zero-shot forecasting at 146,505 parameters: the smallest GIFT-Eval entry that publishes per-configuration results and declares no leakage.

TinyCast forecasts a series it has never seen, with no fitting and no fine-tuning, and returns nine quantiles rather than a single number. It is attention-free, and it computes each context's periodicity instead of learning it, so no capacity is spent rediscovering seasonality.

Below 1.4 M parameters it is the only zero-shot model on the GIFT-Eval board that emits a predictive distribution, and it fits on a microcontroller.

• Try it: https://huggingface.co/spaces/raws-labs/tinycast-forecaster
• Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15767
• Code, training and replication: https://github.com/raws-labs/tinycast
• Parameters: 146,505 (fp32 weights, about 0.6 MB)
• GIFT-Eval, zero-shot: 0.774 nGMASE, 0.545 nWQL, 0.554 nMSIS over 97 configurations
• On a Cortex-M7: 138.1 KiB INT8 weights, 730.7 KiB peak RAM, 4.08 s per call (firmware profile, 0.833 nGMASE)
• License: Apache-2.0

GIFT-Eval results (zero-shot)

Point accuracy (left) and probabilistic accuracy (right) against parameter count, log scale, over the 97 GIFT-Eval configurations. Filled marker is the host profile, hollow is the firmware profile. Dashed outlines mark models that emit a point forecast, whose nWQL column is a point error and is not comparable.

All three are geometric means, over the 97 benchmark configurations, of the ratio between the model's metric and the seasonal-naive reference's; 1.000 is parity with seasonal naive. Every number on this page comes from one profile: bf16 autocast at compute, flip-invariance symmetrization and period-alignment downsampling, which the reproduction command below runs.

Against every zero-shot model on the board up to 10 M parameters with a public per-configuration result and no declared leakage, recomputed from one pinned snapshot against the same reference:

Parenthesized nWQL means the model emits a point forecast rather than a predictive distribution, so the figure is a point error and is not comparable with the rest. The two Reverso models are the only others here below 1.4 M parameters, and both are in that category.

Other benchmarks. On Chronos-ZS (27 tasks) TinyCast reaches relative MASE 0.880 and relative WQL 0.722; on fev-bench (100 tasks) relative MASE 0.819, relative WQL 0.658 and a skill score of 0.304. On both, every neural model ahead of it carries at least 28 times its parameters. Each benchmark normalizes over its own dataset set, so these aggregates are not comparable with the GIFT-Eval figures above. Disjointness is not established on fev-bench: twelve of its hundred tasks name corpus subsets we train on.

Model description

Every learned operation is a convolution, a matrix multiplication or a normalization, so the model exports to a static INT8 graph and runs a forecast end to end on an embedded device.

On device

Deployed on an STM32H753 (Arm Cortex-M7) development board as a static W8A8 graph with quantization scales calibrated once and frozen. Single core, no neural accelerator, no off-chip memory.

The board runs the firmware configuration, which scores 0.833 nGMASE and 0.581 nWQL, not the 0.774 / 0.545 headlined above: it executes INT8 and drops both inference-time strategies. Quantization alone, with the strategies kept, costs 2.1% of aggregate point accuracy over all 97 configurations.

Training data. Pretrained once on GIFT-Eval-Pretrain, Chronos KernelSynth and four synthetic shards, for 36,621 steps in about 7.8 h on eight RTX 3090s, roughly 62 accelerator-hours. Before caching, the corpus is filtered on two exclusion lists: of its 71 top-level directories two are removed, leaving 69. GIFT-Eval-Pretrain is published already disjoint from the GIFT-Eval test set, so the overlap list removes nothing here and exists for the secondary benchmark. No per-dataset fine-tuning; every result above is zero-shot.

Files

• model.safetensors: 146,505 fp32 parameters, about 0.6 MB. The weight-tied feed-forward is stored once, so counting parameters by summing a loaded state_dict() overcounts; instantiate from the config instead.
• config.json: the TinyCastConfig the loader rebuilds the architecture from.

Usage

There is no PyPI package. Install from this repository:

git clone https://github.com/raws-labs/tinycast.git
cd tinycast && pip install -e .

Load the weights:

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from tinycast import load_model

weights = hf_hub_download("raws-labs/tinycast", "model.safetensors")
hf_hub_download("raws-labs/tinycast", "config.json")   # sibling, picked up automatically

model, config = load_model(weights)   # TinyCastForPrediction, 146,505 params

Forecast with the gluonts predictor these results were produced with:

from tinycast import TinyCastPredictor

predictor = TinyCastPredictor(prediction_length=48, checkpoint_path=weights,
                              freq="H", domain="Energy", device="cpu")
forecasts = predictor.predict(test_input)   # QuantileForecasts, nine deciles

Reproduce the table above. The GIFT-Eval data loader is a separate install, needed only by the benchmark driver; note that its distribution name and its import name differ:

pip install "salesforce-gift-eval @ git+https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/gift-eval.git"

# the loader does not fetch the data; download it once first
hf download Salesforce/GiftEval --repo-type dataset --local-dir /path/to/gift-eval

export GIFT_EVAL=/path/to/gift-eval
python -m tinycast.eval --ckpt model.safetensors --flip \
    --device cuda --output all_results.csv

The repository README documents the thread caps that keep this from running many times slower, and everything else that moves the numbers. It also covers the training recipe, checkpoint averaging and export, and the synthetic-corpus builder, all of which ship in the same package.

Intended use and limitations

TinyCast is built for forecasting a univariate signal on hardware that was not chosen for machine learning, where a per-signal model would have to be fitted and maintained for every deployment.

• It is univariate. It uses no covariates and no cross-series structure, so a task that supplies either will be forecast without them.
• The model emits no signal when its input leaves the regime its pretraining covers, so degradation there is silent.
• The period comes from a rounded FFT bin, so its resolution falls as the ratio of window to period falls: about seven percent for a weekly cycle in hourly data.
• Min-max normalization is per context window and therefore sensitive to a single extreme value.
• Fresh deployments degrade toward the seasonal-naive baseline rather than failing: parity at 64 observed samples, and two thirds of the way back to full-context accuracy by 512.

License

Apache-2.0. Third-party attributions are in the code repository's NOTICE.

Citation

@misc{tinycast2026,
  title         = {TinyCast: Probabilistic Zero-Shot Forecasting with Computed Periodicity},
  author        = {Armin Steinhauser},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2608.15767},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.LG}
}