RWKV-CVM: Gated Cross-Variate Mixing for Multivariate Power Load Forecasting

Accurate power load forecasting is essential for efficient electricity grid management, yet capturing cross-variate dependencies in multivariate time series remains a persistent challenge. Recent channel-independent methods based on Transformer and recurrent architectures have achieved strong forecasting performance, but they discard potentially useful information from correlated variates such as weather conditions and neighboring consumption zones. In this paper, we propose RWKV-CVM, a lightweight extension of the RWKV-TS architecture that introduces a trainable Cross-Variate Mixing (CVM) module to selectively incorporate inter-variate information while preserving the linear time complexity of the backbone. The CVM module is a gated, row-stochastic mixing matrix—initialized from the training set absolute Pearson correlations and modulated by a single learned scalar gate that is applied to the normalized input series before patching, adding only 65 trainable parameters to the backbone. We evaluate the method under a single unified harness (three random seeds, consistent normalization, and re-executed DLinear, iTransformer and RWKV-TS baselines) on three settings: the Tetouan city power consumption dataset forecast jointly for all three zones at horizons up to 72 h (including the operationally relevant 24 h day-ahead and 48 h two-day-ahead horizons) and the ETTh1 and Weather benchmarks under a 10% few-shot protocol. Averaged over horizons, RWKV-CVM attains the lowest mean MSE on all three datasets (Tetouan all-zone 0.0427, ETTh1 0.640, Weather 0.250), narrowly ahead of the strongly-tuned baselines and its own RWKV-TS backbone. The advantage is modest, is concentrated at longer horizons, and is selective across target zones; on several individual horizons and in the full-data regime, a baseline is preferable, and we report these cases explicitly. These results indicate that a controlled, lightweight injection of cross-variate information can improve multivariate load forecasting on average without sacrificing computational efficiency.