Deep learning has significantly advanced time series imputation, yet most existing architectures primarily rely on localized temporal context within the corrupted input sequence. This reliance can be limiting in real-world scenarios, where time series often exhibit non-stationary dynamics, weak temporal correlations, and infrequent patterns that are difficult to reconstruct from nearby observations alone. In this paper, we propose ALER-TI, Aligned Latent Embedding Retrieval for Time Series Imputation, a retrieval-augmented framework that explicitly leverages historical patterns to supplement degraded local context for more reliable missing-value reconstruction. The core of ALER-TI is Latent Embedding Alignment (LEA), which mitigates the representation mismatch between corrupted queries and complete historical candidates. By applying post-hoc masking in the latent space, LEA aligns candidates with the query's missingness pattern while allowing historical embeddings to be pre-computed and cached for efficient retrieval. ALER-TI is model-agnostic and can be integrated with various imputation backbones through a lightweight adaptation module. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets under different missing rates demonstrate that ALER-TI consistently improves strong baseline models and enhances robustness across diverse imputation settings.
Multivariate time series imputation is fundamental in applications such as healthcare, traffic forecasting, and biological modeling, where sensor failures and irregular sampling lead to pervasive missing values. Existing Transformer- and diffusion-based imputers achieve strong performance, but they often rely mainly on time-domain modeling and lack adaptive spectral bias for recovering structured temporal gaps. We propose FADTI, a Fourier- and attention-driven diffusion framework for multivariate time series imputation. FADTI introduces a Fourier Bias Projection (FBP) module that injects learnable frequency-aware bias into intermediate hidden states during denoising. It projects intermediate hidden states onto Fourier bases, avoiding direct spectral estimation from masked or zero-filled inputs. With DFT, STFT, and FSST instantiations, FBP captures global periodicity, localized time--frequency variations, and non-stationary oscillatory patterns. By coupling FBP with self-attention and gated convolution, FADTI integrates frequency-domain guidance, temporal dependency modeling, and probabilistic denoising in a unified framework. Experiments on multiple benchmarks, including a new biological imputation benchmark, show that FADTI improves accuracy, uncertainty estimation, and sampling efficiency, especially under high missing rates and structured missing patterns. Code is available at https://github.com/RazeenLI/FADTI
Multivariate time series imputation (MTSI) aims to recover missing values in temporal data composed of multiple interdependent variables. This problem is central to real-world applications such as healthcare monitoring, traffic networks, and energy systems. Recent diffusion-based approaches have shown strong potential for probabilistic imputation by learning to generate missing values through iterative denoising. However, most existing approaches perform diffusion directly in the original data space, requiring the denoising network to simultaneously capture global structure, temporal dynamics, and stochastic variability. This makes the generative task unnecessarily complex, especially when modern deterministic imputers can already provide accurate initial reconstructions. To address this limitation, we propose RDDMPI, a conditional residual diffusion framework that operates directly in residual space. Instead of modeling the full missing signal directly, we reformulate probabilistic imputation as a baseline-residual decomposition, where a pretrained model captures the dominant signal and a diffusion process models the residual uncertainty. To better exploit deterministic guidance, \model{} conditions the reverse denoising process on both the baseline-completed signal and its latent representation, while a reliability-aware conditioning mechanism adaptively controls the influence of baseline information during residual generation. This formulation simplifies the diffusion learning objective, enabling it to focus on structured correction terms rather than reconstructing the full signal. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that RDDMPI consistently improves both reconstruction accuracy and uncertainty quantification.
Multivariate time series imputation is fundamental to downstream analysis, yet modeling inter-variable dependencies with incomplete observations remains challenging. Existing methods learn global dependencies across samples or dynamic local dependencies per sample. Global dependencies are stable but adapt poorly to sample variations and temporal non-stationarity, whereas local dependencies are adaptive yet unreliable when observations are insufficient, causing erroneous information propagation. To address these limitations, we propose GLAIM, a Global-Local Adaptive Inter-variable Dependency Modeling framework for multivariate time series imputation. GLAIM comprises two complementary components. The Stable Global Dependency Constructor derives robust global inter-variable dependencies from complementary temporal representations, providing a stable backbone less affected by sample-specific missingness and noise. The Sample-Conditioned Dependency Refiner adapts this backbone to each sample and time step using its temporal state and available observations, enabling reliable local refinement under incomplete observations. Extensive experiments on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that GLAIM achieves state-of-the-art performance under random and block missingness, remains robust to missing-rate shifts, and benefits from its complementary global and local components. Code is available at https://github.com/LuRenjias/GLAIM.