Benchmarking Sensor-Fault Robustness in Forecasting

Cyber-physical system (CPS) forecasting models depend on sensor streams with noisy, biased, missing, or temporally misaligned readings, yet standard forecasting evaluation often selects models by nominal error without showing whether they remain robust under such faults. We introduce SensorFault-Bench, a CPS-grounded protocol that evaluates forecasting architectures and robustness-improvement methods through controlled synthetic stress tests of isolated input faults, together with an operational taxonomy of the methods. Across four real-world datasets and eight scored scenarios governed by a standardized severity model, it reports worst-scenario degradation, clean mean squared error (MSE), and worst-scenario fault-time MSE, separating relative robustness from absolute error. Explicit fault-training methods train on adjacent fault families disjoint from the scored scenarios. Empirically, forecasting architectures favored by clean MSE can degrade sharply under faults, and clean-MSE rankings can disagree with worst-scenario fault-time error rankings. Chronos-2, the evaluated zero-shot foundation model, matches or trails the last-value naive forecaster in clean MSE on the two single-target datasets and has the largest worst-scenario degradation on ETTh1 and Traffic, where all channels are forecast targets. For the evaluated robustness-improvement method set, paired deltas show selective degradation reductions: projected gradient descent adversarial training and randomized training lead where value faults dominate observed degradation, and fault augmentation leads on Traffic, where availability faults dominate. High degradation reveals fault sensitivity that clean MSE misses, while low degradation supports robustness only within the evaluated scenarios. The benchmark therefore screens forecasters before use in a specific deployment, which requires validation against its recorded faults.