MOIRAI-MOE: Upgrading MOIRAI with Mixture-of-Experts for Enhanced Forecasting | by Nikos Kafritsas

The popular foundation time-series model just got an update

The race to build the Top foundation forecasting model is on!

Salesforce’s MOIRAI, one of the early foundation models, achieved high benchmark results and was open-sourced along with its pretraining dataset, LOTSA.

We extensively analyzed how MOIRAI works here — and built an end-to-end project comparing MOIRAI with popular statistical models.

Salesforce has now released an upgraded version — MOIRAI-MOE — with significant improvements, particularly the addition of Mixture-of-Experts (MOE). We briefly discussed MOE when another model, Time-MOE, also used multiple experts.

In this article, we’ll cover:

How MOIRAI-MOE works and why it’s a powerful model.
Key differences between MOIRAI and MOIRAI-MOE.
How MOIRAI-MOE’s use of Mixture-of-Experts enhances accuracy.
How Mixture-of-Experts generally solves frequency variation issues in foundation time-series models.

Let’s get started.