CARE: A Lightweight Plug-in Gated Correction and Uncertainty-aware Module for Long-term Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

Multivariate long-horizon forecasting is critical to electricity load scheduling and traffic flow management, and to financial risk control. Existing deterministic backbones output a single trajectory, masking heterogeneous prediction difficulty across horizons and channels and providing no localized reliability signal. We present CARE (Corrective branch with Aligned context and Relative-error Estimation), a lightweight plug-in that enhances any deterministic forecaster without architectural redesign. Operating in parallel with the base model, CARE resamples historical context to match the forecast horizon, learns residual correction patterns from this aligned history, and applies scale-aware bounded updates modulated by per-coordinate sigmoid risk gates. A multi-objective loss jointly optimizes forecast accuracy, residual tracking, risk alignment, and base-model anchoring. Across eight benchmarks with three representative backbones, CARE improves accuracy with marginal parameter and latency overhead. Its risk gates reliably identify high-error regions: on Weather, the highest-gate tertile exhibits nearly four times the error of the lowest-gate tertile, offering planners an interpretable per-step trust signal. Code is available at https://github.com/CG-BNYC/CARE.