A Hybrid Attention Model Learning Unified Time-aware Patch Representation for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have recently delivered impressive zero-shot performance across diverse forecasting tasks. However, real-world decision-making frequently relies on irregular multivariate time series (IMTS), where inconsistent inter-observation intervals and asynchronous sampling across variables coexist with informative missingness. In this paper, we propose a hybrid attention model that learns a unified time-aware patch representation for IMTS forecasting. We first design a time-aware patch encoder that maps a variable number of intra-patch timestamps into a fixed-size embedding, producing a uniform format for irregular patches without resorting to imputation. We then introduce a time bias attention mechanism that calibrates inter-patch temporal misalignment and asynchronous cross-channel dependencies as an auxiliary attention offset. Finally, on top of a decoder-only Transformer backbone, we adopt a hybrid causal mask that preserves a bidirectional full view over the historical context while keeping the forecast horizon strictly autoregressive. To support large-scale pretraining under irregular settings, we also curate VersaTSA, an expanded archive of over $231$B observations that retains the native sampling sparsity of its sources. Experiments on three IMTS benchmarks and a standard regular-MTS benchmark show that our model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on IMTS and remains competitive when transferred to regular forecasting.