cs.LGJul 1, 2026

Timesynth: A Temporal Fidelity Framework for Health Signal Digital Twins

Authors: Md Rakibul HaqueShireen ElhabianWarren Woodrich Pettine

Abstract

Forecasting models for health-signal digital twins must preserve the oscillatory, frequency, phase, and state-transition dynamics of physiological signals, yet the pointwise metrics used to benchmark them cannot detect when these fundamental properties are lost. We show that this blind spot misranks models: across 11 architectures, models with comparable pointwise error diverge by up to 53° in phase accuracy, equivalent to roughly 123 ms for a 1.2 Hz cardiac rhythm and invisible to standard metrics. To enable development of models that escape such failures, we introduce TimeSynth, a controlled benchmarking framework with two reusable components: a physiologically grounded generator producing signals with analytically known ground-truth dynamics from parametric models fitted to real electroencephalography, electrocardiography and photoplethysmogram signals, along with diagnostics quantifying amplitude, frequency, phase, and state-transition fidelity. Linear and full-sequence attention models systematically lose frequency and phase information despite acceptable amplitude error, whereas architectures with localized temporal structure better preserve dynamical fidelity and adapt to observable state transitions; none, however, reliably preserves stochastic switching. Because the dominant determinant of fidelity is architectural, model choice becomes a principled, use-case-driven decision rather than a search for a single winner. TimeSynth thus supplies the controlled preclinical stress test missing before models are coupled to patient data, with a reusable generator and diagnostics for fidelity-aware development.

Explore similar work

May 14, 2026cs.LG

Toward World Modeling of Physiological Signals with Chaos-Theoretic Balancing and Latent Dynamics

Physiological time series signals reflect complex, multi-scale dynamical processes of the human body. Existing modeling studies focus on static tasks such as classification, event forecasting, or short-horizon next step prediction, while long-horizon signal-level forecasting and predictive nature of physiological signals remain underexplored. We introduce NormWear-2, a world model that encodes both multivariate physiological signals and clinical intervention variables into a shared latent space and models their joint temporal evolution as a dynamical system. Our approach combines inference from prior pre-trained knowledge (intuition) with instant non-parametric latent state transition adaptation (insight), enabling coherent forecasting across multiple temporal scales, conditioned on heterogeneous clinical interventions. During the pretraining phase, we find that chaos-theoretic balancing of dynamical regime diversity yields more robust representations, with a smaller balanced corpus outperforming one twice its size and capturing bifurcation regimes. We evaluate the world model performance across diverse real-world physiological datasets spanning heterogeneous temporal resolutions and intervention regimes, covering daily life, point-of-care, and clinical settings, including fitness planning, hemodialysis, diabetes management, and surgical monitoring. These evaluation datasets comprise records from 8,026 subjects, spanning study durations from 3.2 hours for high-resolution signal data to 2.3 years for longitudinal clinical biomarker tracking. NormWear-2 achieves the best overall forecasting performance across time, frequency, and latent representation domains, with significant improvements over state-of-the-art time series foundation models, while maintaining competitive downstream representation quality, providing a step toward general-purpose world models for physiological signals.
Yunfei Luo, Xi Chen, Yuliang Chen +8
Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

Accelerating Reproducible Research in Synthetic EHR Generation

The generation of high-fidelity synthetic Electronic Health Records (EHR) is crucial for advancing medical research while preserving patient privacy. However, head-to-head comparison of existing generative models is hindered by disjointed codebases, incompatible data loaders, conflicting library dependencies, and inconsistent evaluation protocols. To address these gaps, we introduce a lightweight, end-to-end benchmarking framework for reproducible synthetic EHR evaluation, organized as a unified pipeline spanning data ingestion, standardized model training, and architecture-agnostic evaluation. Our current implementation targets the generation of longitudinal ICD diagnosis codes -- the most commonly studied modality in this literature -- and is built on the community-maintained PyHealth library. We reimplement and unify strong baselines (MedGAN, CorGAN, PromptEHR, HALO) under full ICD-9 vocabulary granularity, and add a lightweight GPT-2 baseline from the general-purpose sequence-modeling literature. We contribute a rigorous, architecture-agnostic privacy-utility evaluation suite that applies identically to GAN- and transformer-based generators, and report bootstrapped confidence intervals across all metrics. We further analyze the poor long-tailed performance of existing models and discuss the extensibility of our framework beyond diagnosis codes. By lowering the engineering barrier to running, extending, and evaluating under a single pipeline, we introduce a starting point for community-driven reproducibility and benchmarking synthetic EHR models.
Jalen Jiang, Chufan Gao, Ethan Rasmussen +2
Jun 14, 2026cs.LG

HAPI-EP: Towards Hybrid, Adaptive, and Predictive Digital Twins of Cardiac Electrophysiology

A digital twin (DT) of a patient-specific heart offers significant potential in personalized medicine. However, its rapid and dynamic adaptation to an individual's live data and its predictive capability after adaptation remains central challenges. We examine this challenge from its two building blocks: DT formulation where mechanistic and data-driven models show competing merits and limitations, and DT optimization strategies that are largely driven by a reconstruction objective leading to un-identifiable models. We address both bottlenecks via HAPI -- an AI framework for building hybrid, adaptive, and predictive DTs with three key enablers. First, HAPI constructs a physics-integrated gray-box model in which an interpretable mechanistic backbone is augmented by a neural component that models its residual to the observed data. Second, rather than attempting to pre-encode all possible variations in a static hybrid model, HAPI enables rapid on-the-fly adaptation of the hybrid model to few-shot live data, achieved by feedforward meta-learners realizing amortized inference of both mechanistic and neural parameters of the hybrid model trained with predictive objectives. Finally, we show that this adaptivity corresponds to the construction of a conditional generative model (i.e., the hybrid DT) that endows it with theoretical identifiability and thus strong performance in predictive scenarios. We demonstrate the proof-of-concept of HAPI in cardiac electrophysiology using a hybrid monodomain model with mechanistic reaction kinetics and neural graph diffusion. Across synthetic and real-data studies, we show that HAPI's mechanistic-neural hybridization and predictive adaptation are critical for obtaining identifiable DTs with strong predictive and out-of-distribution capabilities.
Sumeet Vadhavkar, Xiajun Jiang, Yubo Ye +2