MixBench-TS: A Multivariate Time Series Forecasting Benchmark Where Channel Mixing Pays Off

Many recent multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) models incorporate cross-channel modeling, under the implicit assumption that the structure of anomalies may be spread across multiple channels. We evaluate this assumption on eight widely used public benchmarks by introducing a per-segment diagnostic framework that flags, for each labeled anomaly, whether at least one channel deviates individually from its normal history, whether the cross-channel correlation structure changes, or both. The framework shows that no cross-channel rupture occurs without an accompanying univariate deviation across a range of reasonable thresholds. A complementary metric also reveals that on six of the eight benchmarks, at least half of the labeled anomaly segments deviate univariately on 89% to 100% of their timesteps, reaching 100% on three of these datasets. To verify that our framework captures cross-channel structure when present, we construct synthetic data of phase-shifted sinusoidal channels with shared noise. Each anomalous segment is altered through one of two channel-wise corruptions that preserve the per-channel marginal distribution while breaking cross-channel structure, and our framework correctly characterizes these segments as cross-channel-only. On these data, channel-dependent (CD) models successfully exploit the cross-channel signal whereas channel-independent (CI) ones fail. The CI/CD comparison of a recent SOTA detector on real benchmarks further confirms that CD modeling brings no measurable gain. We conclude that current MTSAD benchmarks are unsuitable for validating cross-channel modeling capabilities, and we call for the development of more structurally diverse evaluation sets. The code for this study is publicly available.

Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) is critical across many real-world domains. Existing deep learning approaches fall into two paradigms with distinct limitations: channel-independent (CI) methods unconditionally ignore cross-variable dependencies and model only temporal dynamics, while channel-dependent (CD) methods consider both but typically rely on architectural compromises to mitigate overfitting and computational overhead. We therefore propose Chameleon, a specialized CD state space model (SSM) that enables data-dependent, fine-grained interactions across variables while scaling linearly with their number. By connecting selective SSMs with the Kalman filter, we leverage the missing measurement update in the former for cross-variable modeling while preserving the SSM backbone for robust temporal modeling. We further identify favorable inductive biases of GatedDeltaNet for time series, adapt it as our backbone, and improve generalization through additional techniques, including a previously unexplored stochastic perturbation of reversible instance normalization. On strongly dependent ODE and PEMS datasets, Chameleon achieves the best MSE and MAE across all settings, while its CI ablation and prior CD methods incur 61-178% higher MSE on average. Across 28 standard benchmark settings, Chameleon also achieves better MSE and MAE than each baseline in at least 27 and 22 cases, respectively. Training-time and peak-memory analyses on Traffic and ETT further demonstrate competitive efficiency and favorable memory scalability across different variable counts.

Probabilistic time series foundation models (TSFMs) provide coordinate-wise predictive distributions, but these marginals do not determine a joint distribution over multivariate future trajectories. We study training-free coupling of frozen TSFM marginals into multivariate forecast sample paths. Our primary evaluation fixes the empirical marginal sample multiset at every channel--horizon coordinate across methods, isolating the effect of coupling alone. Historical temporal and channel relations substantially improve their corresponding dependence diagnostics. The same pattern persists when the fixed-marginal constraint is removed and paths are sampled directly, and remains present under native multivariate backbone inference. These results support treating dependence reconstruction as a distinct post-processing problem for probabilistic TSFMs.