Time-Series Foundation Models That Understand Data Revisions

Abstract

Historical observations are not always fixed: statistical agencies revise previously published values as new evidence arrives. Forecasting from a contemporary download can therefore expose a model to information unavailable at the date it purportedly made a prediction. We propose VINTAGE-TS, a revision-aware adaptation of a time-series foundation model that distinguishes observation time from information-availability time. Its targets are the next period's first-published value and the value available a fixed number of days after that publication; neither is declared final truth. A joint predictive distribution preserves dependence between these targets and exposes uncertainty about their difference. We specify an ALFRED-based rolling evaluation, a matched Chronos-2 comparison, conventional and revision-aware baselines, and a separate audit of pretraining overlap. The accompanying software implements validity-interval reconstruction, delayed-label filtering, a frozen-backbone adapter interface, and reproducible diagnostics. An executed synthetic demonstration and a 25-configuration sensitivity suite verify the workflow, expose variation across seeds and revision regimes, and illustrate how hindsight contamination changes measured performance. Thirty one automated tests check temporal and integration contracts. Real ALFRED and Chronos-2 experiments have not been executed; no empirical foundation-model advantage is claimed.