arXiv:2611.10521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale retail supply chains need sales forecasts for specified products, future dates or planning windows, and regions under the conditions available at the forecast origin. Regional sparsity, changing environments, volatile sales, and unfamiliar business situations make these dimensions difficult to model together. We introduce TimeHF 2.0, a multimodal, multivariate, and multi-region collaborative forecasting framework that makes flexibly expressed business knowledge usable in numerical prediction. A coverage-aware directed encoder integrates regional sales and applicable covariates. A semantic alignment module transfers language-model hidden representations of natural-language plans and domain experience into target-specific forecasting context. Learning against sales observations connects these meanings to numerical evidence, allowing business users to supply experience, future plans, and changing circumstances without defining a new numerical feature for each description. Text-conditioned future queries and shared/routed experts adapt prediction to the supplied context. An ordered-distribution head allocates fine resolution to routine fluctuations and coarse resolution to extreme sales movements, while daily/window learning connects forecasts to cumulative planning quantities. Online parallel forecasting at JD yields relative accuracy improvements of 18.25% and 17.94% for national daily and planning-window sales, and 19.44% and 18.99% for DC daily and planning-window sales, over the original production deep learning baseline. Component comparisons, loss-design results, and product-type analyses examine the roles of regional information, covariates, business knowledge, context-dependent processing, and robust planning-oriented learning.
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