Latent flow models have proven to be a reliable and cost-effective method for time series generation. However, the latent compression induces unwanted artefacts, such as a spectral mismatch with respect to the underlying dataset, thus hindering their use as training surrogates. In this article, we propose a spectrally-aligned latent-flow time series generator, where the latent space for flow matching is trained to preserve dynamical properties that are relevant for the suitability of synthetic samples. We find that incorporating fine-tuning losses based on canonical signal representations such as the Fourier, wavelet and signature transforms helps overcome these issues. The interpretability of these transformations allows us to ensure that the synthetic signals are aligned with the true ones in terms of relevant features, such as smoothness or targeted spectral content, as opposed to relying on pointwise reconstruction losses only. We compare the proposed aligned models against a base latent-flow model and the state of the art over real-world long-range univariate and multivariate benchmark datasets. Our quantitative results validate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of its performance on metrics reflecting signal realness and computational efficiency, while being aligned to the training set with respect to its local structure.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Fourier power spectrum of the Exchange rate dataset ( Lai et al., 2018 ) (mean ± 1 st. dev. , logscale): true samples (left), example of a non-aligned base flow model (centre), and our proposed aligned flow model (right). Observe how the non-aligned model exhibits a spectral artefact in the form of a peak at around frequency 0.25 , which is largely minimised by the proposed alignment strategy.
Figure 2: Latent flow matching for time-series generation. We a) train an encoder-decoder pair (E,D) for reconstruction, then b) fine-tune it with a transform-consistency loss. We then c) train a flow-matching model in the latent space to transport a Gaussian prior to the distribution of encoded latents, and d) sample by drawing from the prior, applying the flow, and decoding to obtain new time-series samples.
dataset
Model
Discriminative score
Predictive score
KS t=300
KS t=500
KS t=700
KS t=900
Base + Fourier cons. (ours)
0.018±.012
0.043±.001
0.15 (3%)
0.15 (4%)
0.14 (2%)
0.15 (3%)
Base + wavelet cons. (ours)
0.022±.015
0.043±.000
0.15 (3%)
0.17 (12%)
0.15 (4%)
0.15 (2%)
Base + signature cons. (ours)
0.208±.100
0.042±.000
0.17 (12%)
0.15 (3%)
0.16 (5%)
0.15 (4%)
HEPC
Base model (ours)
0.211±.103
0.043±.000
0.16 (7%)
0.15 (5%)
0.14 (2%)
0.16 (7%)
SigDiffusion
0.070±.032
0.050±.012
0.20 (16%)
0.18 (9%)
0.19 (12%)
0.21 (22%)
DDO ( γ = 1)
0.081±.019
0.044±.001
0.25 (46%)
0.23 (38%)
0.25 (46%)
0.25 (51%)
Table 1: Discriminative, predictive and KS test metrics (KS score and rejection percentage in brackets). Less is better for all metrics. The results are computed for 1000 synthetically generated time series of length 1000, compared to 1000 unseen series from the original datasets. The KS tests are computed over the temporal indices t=300,500,700,900 .
Figure 3: Signals from the weather dataset ( Kolle, 2024 ) and their reconstructions from the base and Fourier-aligned autoencoders.
Figure 4: First dimension of FM-generated samples vs testing data for the weather dataset ( Kolle, 2024 ) . The subcaption shows the underlying models used. The five samples from both models were drawn by solving the FM ODE from the same Gaussian source sample.
Figure 5: Comparison of density and t-SNE plots on the HEPC dataset.
Figure 6: Comparison of density and t-SNE plots on the Exchange dataset.
Figure 7: Comparison of density and t-SNE plots on the Weather dataset.
transform
weights
disc. score ↓
pred. score ↓
wavelet
Sobolev
0.28±.10
0.16±.00
truncated
0.47±.03
0.16±.00
Fourier
Sobolev
0.35±.15
0.16±.00
truncated
0.5±.00
0.47±.01
None
uniform
0.37±.11
0.16±.00
Table 2: Performance of the truncated version of the Fourier and wavelet consistency losses, using the Weather dataset. The abbreviations are disc. for the discriminative score, and pred. for the predictive score, respectively.
Figure 8: Sum of the reconstruction error for each frequency bin. The subcaption indicates the underlying dataset. The sections where the alignment helps decrease the reconstruction error are highlighted in red.
Figure 9: Sum of the reconstruction error averaged over each Wavelet level. The subcaption indicates the underlying dataset.
Figure 10: Sum of the reconstruction error averaged over the Signature level. The subcaption indicates the underlying dataset.
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Dataset
Dim.
N. train
Variant
Levels (dim.)
Train time
Fine-tuning
flow training
Total time
HEPC
1
8242
Base
4m 5s
5m 34s
9m 39s
Fourier
- (1000)
14s
9m 53s
Wavelet
5 (1040)
34s
10m 13s
Signature
5 (62)
6m 35s
16m 14s
Exchange rates
8
5088
Base
3m 2s
3m 24s
6m 26s
Fourier
- (1000 × 8)
9s
6m 35s
Appendix
Table 3: Experimental details for the empirical evaluation of the transform-consistency losses. We present each dataset and its dimensionality. This, in turns, modifies the dimensionality of their transformed inputs, which are detailed along with the depths/decomposition levels used. The training times for each stage are also provided.
Dataset
Dim.
Latent dim.
Inner dim. flow
Total params.
FM epochs
HEPC
1
64
258
2.021 M
500
Exchange rates
8
128
512
8.037 M
500
Weather
14
128
512
8.037 M
250
Appendix
Table 4: Specifications of epochs and latent and hidden dimensionality for each dataset. The abbreviation “dim.” stands for dimensionality and “params.” for parameters. The number of epochs used to train the laten flow models is shown as “FM epochs”.
Figure 11: Effect of varying the Sobolev exponent s .
depth
3
4
5
6
7
time
2m 33s
4m 15s
6m 35s
9m 29s
12m 50s
dim
14
30
62
126
254
disc.
.21±.13
.17±.12
.18±.14
.17±.12
.12±.11
Appendix
Table 5: Change in fine-tuning times (25 epochs), dimensionality, and discriminative score for varying signature transform depth as observed for the HEPC dataset. The abbreviation disc. stands for the discriminative score, and the 0 before the decimal is omitted from the discriminative score results.
Latent diffusion and flow matching have emerged as leading approaches for synthetic turbulence generation, yet they systematically under-represent dissipation-range amplitudes. We introduce a latent flow matching framework with a spectrally regularized compression stage that directly targets this failure mode. On a 256^2 DNS dataset at Re_f \approx 2250, replacing an MSE-trained VAE with a zone-weighted log-spectral objective raises deep-dissipation retained spectral power from 25% to 94% in reconstruction and from 20% to 79% in unconditional generation. The improved latent representation also yields a substantially better sampling cost-fidelity tradeoff: the MSE-trained latent space imposes a fundamental quality ceiling near DD bias -0.70 that no integrator or step-count can overcome, while the spectrally regularized latent space reaches DD bias -0.117 at just 20 function evaluations. Mechanistically, encoder-decoder swap experiments show that the improvement is driven primarily by encoder-induced latent reorganization rather than decoder capacity, while a support-amplitude decomposition reveals that MSE-trained models behave as conservative suppression models, minimizing pointwise error by attenuating intermittent high-wavenumber structure. Both pipelines recover the second-order structure function and the correct sign of S_3, indicating the correct cascade direction without explicit supervision. A small residual gap in the magnitude of S_3 suggests that phase-coherent triadic organization remains a complementary axis to amplitude fidelity for future generative turbulence models.
Khalid Rafiq, Aditya G. Nair
Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA
Synthetic time series are increasingly used for data augmentation, privacy-preserving data sharing, and downstream model development, yet faithfully reproducing both multi-scale temporal structure and cross-channel dependencies remains challenging. We study multivariate time-series generation through flow matching in the wavelet domain. By operating on multilevel discrete wavelet coefficients rather than directly in the time domain, the model represents coarse structure and progressively finer details at separate scales. Their naturally different variances further induce an implicit coarse-to-fine generative process without requiring an explicit multi-scale schedule. Since the transform acts independently on each channel, we pair it with a channel-token transformer whose attention directly models cross-channel dependencies. Across seven benchmark datasets and four sequence lengths, our method is best or tied on a majority of dataset-metric combinations, with the largest and most consistent improvements in Context-FID and discriminative score.
Lucas Poinsignon, Jorge da Silva Goncalves, Samuel Ruiperez-Campillo +1
Generating high-quality time-series data is challenging because real-world signals often exhibit multimodal patterns and multiscale dynamics, including oscillations and high-frequency variations. Flow Matching (FM) offers an efficient alternative to diffusion models, but practical implementations typically rely on a single finite-capacity global vector-field estimator. In such heterogeneous temporal distributions, distinct regimes may pass through nearby flow states while requiring incompatible conditional velocities. A monolithic estimator trained with the standard ℓ2 velocity-matching objective may therefore learn an overly smoothed approximation of the local transport field. This estimator-level smoothing can attenuate branch-specific dynamics, leading to spectral distortion and poor mode coverage. To address this, we propose PrismFlow, a new FM method with Koopman-inspired dynamical experts. Each expert learns residual corrections in a latent space where local nonlinear temporal evolution can be approximated by linear transitions. We further propose a confidence-aware Winner-Take-All (WTA) objective that updates only the expert best aligned with each sample while masking gradients to the others, encouraging mode-specific specialization. During sampling, the selected expert adds a residual dynamical correction to the global transport field, preserving FM stability while recovering fine-grained and high-frequency temporal structures. Across various benchmarks, PrismFlow effectively mitigates the spectral contraction in standard FM and achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a 15.6% gain in Context-FID and a 38.6% improvement in Discriminative Score, while remaining robust in low-data settings and effective for forecasting and imputation.
Junru Zhang, Lang Feng, Jinbo Wang +6
Zhejiang University, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · I2R, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore