Big Models, Small Gains: Frozen Forecasters as Classifiers on MONSTER

arXiv:2611.06988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forecasting foundation models are increasingly used as frozen feature extractors for time series classification, but it remains unclear whether their pretrained representations offer an advantage over strong classifiers that do not require pretraining. This raises an important question: do these representations provide useful information beyond what the model architecture alone can capture, particularly when labelled data are scarce? We present a controlled benchmarking of two forecasting models, Reverso and Chronos-Bolt, on six large datasets from the MONSTER benchmark, using 1%, 10%, and 100% of the available training labels.