Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Overview

Time-series anomaly detection seeks unusual points, intervals, or changes in relationships among signals, often when labeled failures are scarce and early warnings matter. Common approaches forecast or reconstruct normal behavior and flag large residuals; others use density models, learned representations, graphs, causal structure, or ensembles to capture dependencies and changing operating regimes. Research spans univariate and multivariate benchmarks as well as industrial, medical, network, and edge-device settings, with growing attention to localization, explanations, and compute limits. A central tension is that results depend heavily on evaluation metrics, thresholds, windowing, and anomaly types, while strong benchmark scores may not carry over to distribution shifts or real-time deployment.

Latest papers

208 papers35 papers in the last four weeks, up 169% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Jul 7, 2026

Modeling Normal Is All You Need: Joint Latent Clustering for Anomaly Detection in Multimodal Cyber-Physical Systems

Faults on a cyber-physical system (CPS) are too rare and unrepresentative to characterise, or even to select a model on, so detection must instead model normal behaviour; the standard point-adjusted evaluation, however, rewards detectors that never do. CPS normal behaviour is the union of many imbalanced, curved, thin-fringed operating regimes rather than a single blob; we state this structure as ten assumptions (A1-A10), abbreviated Massive, Implicit, Imbalanced Multimodality (MIIM). We model the normal law with a jointly learned latent representation plus explicit Gaussian-mixture mode clustering, scored in the latent rather than by a global density or a reconstruction residual, and evaluate under a deliberately fair protocol: raw point-wise metrics with no point adjustment, a trivial-detector difficulty split, prevalence-matched F1, and train-normal-only calibration. On three real CPS datasets (WADI, HAI, SKAB), the detector wins both the combined column and the difficult correlation/dynamics-fault column on all three, reaching difficult-subset AUROC 0.831 on HAI, 0.726 on WADI, and 0.610 on SKAB. The margin is largest on the two multimodal datasets the MIIM assumptions target and slimmest on the near-unimodal one, tracking multimodality as the thesis predicts, and it holds against three deep detectors (USAD, TranAD, GDN) re-computed with the same raw metrics, all of which collapse on the difficult subset. The methodological contributions are the MIIM assumption set, the difficulty-stratified fair protocol, and a latent-only score that drops reconstruction because a flexible decoder rebuilds the hard faults faithfully.
Jul 2, 2026

Predictive Conformal Slip Monitoring: An Empirical Evaluation of Rolling Split Conformal Prediction for Pre-Incident Traction Loss Detection

Conventional traction control architectures intervene only after the adhesion limit of a tire has already been breached. This paper investigates whether Rolling Split Conformal Prediction , monitoring the volatility of non-conformity residuals from a per-driver Random Forest model of expected slip behavior , can serve as a statistically grounded pre-incident warning signal, ahead of gross traction loss. Unlike an earlier internal draft of this work, the evaluation reported here corrects a confound in the slip proxy (vehicle speed is included as an explicit model feature, not left implicit in the target's denominator), uses every racing lap for each driver rather than only the fastest lap, and is scored against real, timestamped incident labels extracted from FIA Race Control Messages and track-limits lap deletions rather than narrated post-hoc. The result is negative: across 19 drivers and 55,563 test-phase telemetry samples, the rolling-volatility detector achieves a mean precision of essentially 0.0 and mean recall of 0.0 against 14 ground-truth incidents, while flagging on average 15.3% of all samples as anomalous , too high a false-alarm rate for any early-warning use. A static 95th-percentile threshold baseline performs no better in any way that would justify the added complexity of the conformal-volatility formulation. Residual autocorrelation diagnostics show the split-conformal exchangeability assumption is violated for every driver (Ljung-Box p < 0.001, n = 19/19), which is one plausible driver of the high false-alarm rate. We report this as a methodologically rigorous negative finding, diagnose its likely causes, and outline what a genuinely predictive version of this approach would require.
Jul 2, 2026

Fast and Accurate Anomaly Detection in Time Series

Anomaly detection is a critical and evolving field in Machine Learning, with applications targeting different domains such as cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, manufacturing and IoT (Internet of Things) systems. Traditionally, anomaly detection algorithms have been designed using both supervised and unsupervised learning paradigms. The fundamental challenge in real-world anomaly detection scenarios is related to the inherent class imbalance (anomalies are typically rare) and, for supervised methods, to the scarcity of labelled anomalous data. Indeed, labelling is both expensive and time-consuming. Conversely unsupervised methods do not require labelling, but may suffer from high false positive rates when deployed in safety-critical applications. In this work we introduce a novel unsupervised algorithm for anomaly detection in time series based on the Haar discrete wavelet and a suitably designed tt-test. We establish the theoretical foundation of the proposed tt-test and, through extensive experimentation across 343 datasets, demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised and self-supervised benchmarks.
Jul 1, 2026

Detecting the Undetectable: Enhancing Unsupervised time series Anomaly Detection via Active Learning

Despite the increasing sophistication of industrial AI systems, the ability to reliably detect subtle and noisy anomalies in complex time series data remains a critical yet unresolved challenge. In large-scale industrial applications, labeling time series data is often prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, making unsupervised learning a practical and widely adopted approach. However, existing unsupervised methods frequently struggle to distinguish near-normal anomalies from normal patterns and are vulnerable to noise contamination within normal samples. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that leverages active learning to iteratively enhance the performance of unsupervised models. Our framework's core contributions are (1) a masked time-series reconstruction feedback strategy that forces the model to learn robust temporal dependencies, and (2) a minimax learning strategy that promotes robustness by differentially treating normal and abnormal samples. This process encourages the model to better capture the dynamics of subtle and noisy patterns. The proposed framework is evaluated across 28 test cases involving four multivariate time-series datasets and seven unsupervised backbone models. Experimental results demonstrate a 12.39% improvement in AUC compared to the original models, confirming that our method can be readily integrated into existing unsupervised reconstruction-based anomaly detection systems to significantly enhance their performance.
Jun 30, 2026

Distributed Hierarchical Temporal Memory with Shared Associative Memory for Cross-Entity Preemptive Warning

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series remains a critical challenge in large-scale distributed systems, where related entities may exhibit transferable precursor behavior prior to anomaly onset. Existing methods typically operate independently on each data stream and therefore remain fundamentally reactive. To address this limitation, we introduce Distributed Hierarchical Temporal Memory (D-HTM), a neuromorphic framework that enables cross-entity preemptive warning through a Shared Associative Memory (SAM). D-HTM combines a Spatial Pooler (SP) that projects observations into a common Sparse Distributed Representation (SDR) space, Temporal Memory (TM) modules that learn entity-specific dynamics online, and a Shared Associative Memory that stores recurring pre-anomaly signatures. By reusing precursor knowledge across related entities, D-HTM can issue warnings prior to local anomaly onset while preserving HTM's online learning capabilities. We evaluate D-HTM on the Server Machine Dataset (SMD), the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) dataset, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) dataset, and a synthetic cascade benchmark designed to isolate precursor transfer. Experimental results demonstrate effective cross-entity warning propagation while maintaining competitive reactive anomaly detection performance. Across the real-world datasets, D-HTM provides an average warning lead time of 8.1 samples prior to anomaly onset. These findings demonstrate that transferable precursor structure can emerge within a shared SDR space and be reused for preemptive warning generation, extending HTM beyond isolated reactive detection toward distributed predictive reasoning.
Jun 29, 2026

Redefining Maritime Anomaly Detection via Equation-Grounded Synthetic Anomalies

Maritime anomaly detection is essential for ensuring maritime safety, security, and efficient traffic management at sea, with Automatic Identification System (AIS) data serving as a primary data source. Despite its importance, most publicly available AIS datasets lack predefined anomaly labels, forcing prior studies to rely on either distribution-based rarity or domain rule/expert-assisted labeling. These approaches, however, face fundamental limitations: statistical rarity often fails to reflect practically critical events, while expert-based labeling is costly, subjective, and difficult to scale. Moreover, both paradigms tend to overlook interaction-driven hazards such as near-miss approaches between vessels. To address these challenges, we propose an equation-grounded anomaly taxonomy that is implementable under a limited AIS observation schema and extensible to other AIS datasets. Specifically, the taxonomy defines three anomaly types: unexpected AIS activity (A1), route deviation (A2), and close approach (A3), covering both single-vessel and inter-vessel anomalies. Building on this taxonomy, we introduce a unified score-synthesize-label pipeline that produces LLM-guided plausibility scores, uses them to synthesize anomalies, and assigns timestamp-level labels. To rigorously assess detection performance, we further design benchmark evaluation settings that account for variations in temporal-window length and anomaly-type composition, and evaluate a broad range of time-series models and anomaly detection models. Together, these contributions provide a systematic basis for evaluating maritime anomaly detection methods across different anomaly types. Our code is available at https://github.com/snudial/open-maritime-anomaly-detection.
Jun 26, 2026

An Agentic AI Pipeline for Appliance-Level Energy Anomaly Detection and LLM-Driven Recommendations

Appliance-level energy monitoring in office buildings produces noisy alerts that non-expert facility managers struggle to use. This paper proposes an end-to-end agentic pipeline that combines deep time-series forecasting, variational anomaly detection, and LLM-based reasoning to generate prioritized, actionable maintenance recommendations. The system tracks seven office appliances using a hybrid Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) forecasting model, and applies a per-appliance LSTM Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with attention to flag abnormal daily consumption episodes. A three-stage LangChain pipeline begins with a Context Agent that always retrieves three core RAG sources (model reliability, hourly baseline, and expert knowledge) and conditionally adds up to three more (forecast context, anomaly history, global baseline) based on event characteristics, capped at eight reasoning steps. A Diagnosis Agent converts the evidence into a structured JSON diagnosis, and a Report Agent renders a human-readable narrative. A reflective memory layer incorporates operator feedback. The dashboard shows real-time 30-minute forecasts, intraday consumption, the previous day anomaly report, and a feedback form. We evaluate the forecasting model, anomaly detector with appliance-specific thresholds, and LLM reasoning on a 16-scenario benchmark including sustained and transient spikes, unexpected shutdowns, and systemic events, comparing five LLM backends under static vs. dynamic retrieval. Dynamic retrieval matches full static retrieval across all backends while cutting average context from six to three-six sources per event. The best backend scores 90.4/100 with a 100% pass rate at a 70-point threshold, and a fully local 7B-parameter model passes all 16 scenarios.
Jun 22, 2026

Weighted Score-Oriented Losses for Temporally Localized Event Prediction

Operational event-detection systems are rarely assessed by pointwise accuracy alone. In anomaly detection, changepoint detection, and warning systems, the utility of an alarm depends on its temporal position relative to an event. This produces a score-loss mismatch. Neural networks are commonly trained with classical loss functions, such as cross-entropy, whereas deployment decisions are obtained by thresholding network predictions, merging alarms through post-processing rules, and evaluating them with event-based metrics defined by detection windows and false-alarm costs. This paper studies a temporally localized specialization of weighted score-oriented loss (wSOL) for event prediction. Starting from score-oriented losses based on expected confusion matrices and from the weighted SOL framework of Marchetti et al., we consider temporal weights that discount near-event false positives and reduce false-negative penalties when an event is preceded by an admissible alarm. The resulting objective is differentiable with respect to the network predictions, and therefore can be optimized by back-propagation. It can be instantiated with balanced accuracy, true skill statistic, F1, critical success index, and related confusion-matrix scores. We evaluate the proposed approach by comparing cross-entropy, unweighted score-oriented loss, and wSOL on three benchmark datasets for time-series event prediction and detection. The results show that wSOL can improve performance when the evaluation utility is localized in time and is not already encoded by the pointwise labels.
Jun 20, 2026

Learning a Normal World Model for Few-Shot Boundary-Calibrated Abnormality Detection

Abnormality detection in complex systems faces two practical barriers: abnormal labels are scarce, and binary labels do not quantify how far an event has departed from normal behavior. We study a normal-world modeling formulation for this setting. Instead of learning a large and incomplete space of abnormal classes, the model learns the normal world from abundant normal events and uses a few abnormal examples only to calibrate the boundary of normality. We instantiate this idea as a Hypergraph Entropic Normal-World Model. The model represents multivariate sensor windows as context-conditioned hypergraphs, where hyperedges capture high-order relations among groups of variables. It then defines abnormality by an entropy-aware normal-world energy that combines temporal prediction surprise, hypergraph consistency surprise, and latent normal-manifold departure. On the NASA C-MAPSS turbofan degradation benchmark, the proposed full energy achieves strong zero-shot and few-shot performance across all four subsets and reaches AUROC 0.9983 on FD004, the most complex setting with multiple operating conditions and fault modes. Beyond standard detection metrics, we introduce mechanistic validation tests to probe whether the energy encodes normal-world structure rather than a superficial input-output mapping. The learned energy accepts unseen healthy engines, increases along degradation trajectories, and sharply penalizes context-mismatched cross-variable coupling breaks. These results suggest that normal-world energy can serve as an anomaly score, a graded risk measure, and a testable representation of normal system behavior under severe abnormal-label scarcity.
Jun 19, 2026

Distinguishing indistinguishable attractors: Unsupervised anomaly detection with reservoir computers

Detecting when a nonlinear dynamical system departs from its normal regime is a recurring problem across the sciences, from cardiology to climate and energy systems. We show that a very simple Kolmogorov--Smirnov test on the output weights of a reservoir computer is highly sensitive to regime changes in nonlinear dynamical systems, including those invisible to both classical nonlinear measures and modern deep-learning detectors. The core idea of our algorithm is to treat the readout layer of a reservoir computer as a representation of the input dynamics. Since the input mapping and the reservoir itself are random and fixed, the trained output weights are the only object encoding the system at hand. We summarize this fingerprint by the empirical cumulative distribution function of the readout weights and compare it to a reference band built from the training data. This unsupervised, online detector distinguishes two visually indistinguishable butterfly-shaped attractors, resolves parameter drifts seven times smaller than the strongest deep-learning baseline, flags noise four orders of magnitude below the signal, and identifies ventricular flutter in a clinical ECG recording. More broadly, we aim to establish a perspective on reservoir computers in which the trained output weights are treated as a representation of the learned system in their own right, rather than merely as a means to forecasting.
Jun 18, 2026

PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference.
Jun 17, 2026

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.
Jun 17, 2026

Anomaly Detection for Sparse and Irregular Multivariate Time Series with Latent SDEs

Multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) is critical for a wide range of application areas, such as industrial monitoring, cybersecurity, or healthcare. Real-world data is often sparse, irregularly sampled or partially observed, yet existing methods assume uniformly sampled time series. We propose a generative approach based on Latent SDEs that projects the observed time series on a continuous-time stochastic dynamical system, directly being able to handle missing observations and irregular sampling, while also naturally capturing possible cyclic behavior that many real-world use cases inherently possess. Experiments on six anomaly benchmark datasets show that our proposed method ranks first among state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate that our method remains robust under severe data sparsity, while performance significantly degrades for the tested baseline methods. These results highlight latent SDEs as a natural inductive bias for anomaly detection in multivariate time series, especially in presence of real-world irregularities.
Jun 11, 2026

CRAFTIIF: Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is challenged by four structurally distinct anomaly types -- point (isolated spikes), distributional (level shifts), temporal (rhythm changes), and collective (inter-sensor correlation breakdowns) -- each requiring different feature representations. Most unsupervised methods target only one or two types and provide limited interpretability. We present CRAFTIIF (Cross-Resolution Analytic Four-Type Interpretable Isolation Forest), a fully unsupervised framework targeting all four types without dataset-specific tuning. CRAFTIIF generates K=500 random analytic wavelet feature draws across four families (Morlet, DOG, Haar, Coiflet), each targeting a specific anomaly type, feeding five structured Isolation Forests -- one per type plus a meta-IF for compound anomalies. An adaptive Otsu/MAD threshold calibrates detection automatically across anomaly rates from 0.1% to 69.2%. Because each IF is trained exclusively on type-specific features, branch firing provides direct anomaly-type attribution by construction, without post-hoc explanation. Evaluated on all 19 datasets of the mTSBench benchmark (Zhou et al., TMLR 2026), CRAFTIIF achieves mean F1=0.228 (all 19 datasets) and F1=0.322 (13 detectable datasets), ranking first among all 25 evaluated methods on VUS-PR (0.463 vs. previous best 0.329, +40.7%). A diagnostic framework -- oracle F1, detectability limits, and branch separation ratios -- identifies 6 of 19 datasets as fundamentally undetectable by any unsupervised method. Ablation over 11 conditions confirms adaptive thresholding (+38% F1), four-branch structure (+20%), and meta-IF (+23%) are each essential. Code: https://github.com/smitswil/craftiif
Jun 11, 2026

Rarity-Gated Context Conditioning for Offline Imitation Learning-Based Maritime Anomaly Detection

Contextual anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal behavior conditional on context variables, but practical deployments often face highly imbalanced context distributions where rare regimes can be critical information. Under such frequency bias, context-conditioned models can produce unstable decisions and excessive false alarms in rare contexts. We propose Rarity-Gated Feature-wise Linear Modulation (RGFiLM), a rarity-aware conditioning module that combines feature-wise modulation (i.e., context-conditioned scaling and shifting of hidden features) with a gate controlled by a data-driven rarity score. The rarity score is estimated from the empirical distribution of context variables and regulates how strongly context modulates intermediate representations: the gate becomes more decisive under rare contexts while remaining conservative under frequent contexts. We evaluate RGFiLM on maritime trajectory anomaly detection using AIS motion sequences with ERA5 environmental context in an environment-sensitive detour scenario. When instantiated in a sequential anomaly scoring pipeline, RGFiLM achieves the best mean F1--False Positive Rate (FPR) trade-off among the compared context-agnostic and context-conditioned methods. These results suggest that explicitly accounting for context rarity is an effective approach for reducing false alarms in context-sensitive anomaly detection.
Jun 11, 2026

ProtoX-AD: Self-Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection and Characterization

Recent advances in time series anomaly detection (TSAD) have highlighted the effectiveness of self-supervised classification-based approaches. These methods apply transformations to normal training samples, training a classifier to recognize transformation-specific patterns that help identify anomalies through increased classification errors. Despite their strong performance, a significant challenge is their lack of explainability, as they provide limited insight into the characteristics of flagged anomalies. To address this limitation, we propose ProtoX-AD, a prototype-based self-explainable framework for self-supervised TSAD. ProtoX-AD learns transformation-aware latent representations alongside interpretable prototypes, enabling both accurate anomaly detection and the identification of distinct anomalous profiles through prototype-based explanations. Additionally, it allows for systematic analysis of how transformation design impacts detection performance and explainability. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProtoX-AD achieves detection performance comparable to its black-box counterparts while offering more consistent and semantically meaningful explanations than existing explainable baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aitorzan3/ProtoX-AD.
Jun 10, 2026

APEX: A Network-Native Time-Series Foundation Model for Forecasting and Anomaly Detection for Wireless Edge Operations

Generic time-series foundation models transfer poorly to wireless network telemetry whose signals are bursty, zero-inflated, and coupled across protocol layers. We present APEX, a network-native, decoder-only transformer for forecasting enterprise AP telemetry, and evaluate it on DHCP degradation as a representative network task. APEX is pre-trained on 10-channel multivariate telemetry from ~4,500 production wireless networks (~100K AP time series, 34 metrics per AP), and is available as APEX-Large (269M, cloud) and APEX-Edge (10.5M, edge). On a 192-step (4-day) DHCP degradation benchmark, APEX-Large reduces MAE by 18% over the strongest foundation-model baseline (Toto) and 38% over SARIMA, with anomaly-detection F1 = 0.93, while APEX-Edge enables sub-second, privacy-preserving inference on AP-class edge hardware. These results suggest network-native pre-training is a practical foundation for proactive wireless operations.
Jun 9, 2026

The Distributed Detectability Band Against Marginal-Preserving Attacks

AI-control monitors score individual agent actions to detect misbehavior, but real harm can be distributed across many benign-looking steps, each individually below any per-step alarm. We construct a marginal-preserving, correlation-encoded distributed-sabotage attack using a Gaussian-copula AR(1) construction: the per-step monitor-score marginal is held exactly equal to benign, so mean, max, top-k tail, and threshold monitors (Monitor A) are defeated by construction, while harm is encoded in the temporal correlation structure. We sequence the paper around three reviewer-mandated gates. (1) Realizability gate: the stealthy attack achieves KS-distance to benign of 0.013 (effectively zero) at all tested harm levels up to 3.0, confirming that harm is fully decoupled from the per-step marginal and realizability is not harm-limited. (2) Monitor-A-vs-B reconciliation: we show formally that the attack, built against Monitor A's score marginal, remains marginal-preserving under a different-score Monitor B (the correlation/sequence family: CUSUM, SPRT, HMM-LR, runs test, autocorrelation, windowed logistic), and scope worst-case claims to score functions that admit a temporal signature. (3) Non-empty detectability band: Monitor A achieves AUC 0.52 (chance); Monitor B spans AUC 0.79-0.97 at the same 1% FPR target, and as harm is amortized over more steps Monitor A collapses to chance while Monitor B holds at AUC ~0.95. These results demonstrate a non-empty detectability band and characterize the sub-threshold sabotage frontier: distribution-shape monitors fail by construction; temporal-correlation monitors can detect but are not trivially optimal.
Jun 8, 2026

PAI: Preserving Amplitude Information in Representation-Based Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Representation-based time-series anomaly detection algorithms significantly outperform other methods on diverse anomaly detection tasks. However, we notice that they suffer from a major limitation in our evaluation - their learned embeddings are often amplitude-agnostic. Losing amplitude information can degrade performance on amplitude related anomalies, and this failure is prevalent across all existing representation-based methods. To address aforementioned issues, we propose a new anomaly scoring scheme named PAI. PAI consists of two complementary modules, a diagnostic module and a final score augmentation function. The diagnostic module compares cosine and Euclidean scoring on the same representation bank to test whether amplitude information is already captured in the learned representation. Then in final score augmentation function, PAI computes a point-wise median and MAD deviation score and a local mean-shift score-which are fused with the representation score to produce the final anomaly score. On the TSB-AD-U-Eva and TAB UV datasets, PAI improves all four evaluated representation-based methods across every reported metric, achieving average VUS-PR gains of 98.4% and 36.8%, respectively. Among all evaluated combinations, PaAno + PAI achieves the best performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art method by 15%. Further evaluation on bootstrap confidence intervals, anomaly-type breakdowns, and a TS2Vec input-normalization ablation further support the proposed scheme. These results suggest that explicitly retaining amplitude information is important for representation-based time-series anomaly detection, which has been underemphasized in existing scoring schemes. Code is available at: https://github.com/pantheon5100/PAI
Jun 8, 2026

Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis for Microservice Systems

Microservice systems are widely used to build cloud applications, yet their complexity makes failures inevitable, degrading user experience and causing economic loss. Automated anomaly detection and root cause analysis (RCA) are now active research areas, but existing techniques share five limitations. First, most treat anomaly detection and RCA separately, assuming anomalies are detected correctly, and falter when detection is imprecise due to noise or delay. Second, they focus on metrics, logs, and traces, leaving event data such as API calls and configuration changes underexplored. Third, many require a given service call graph and cannot diagnose without one. Fourth, the field lacks standardised datasets and evaluation frameworks, so methods are hard to compare fairly. Fifth, although causal inference-based RCA has become dominant, its effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness remain unclear. This thesis addresses these limitations through two groups of contributions. The first introduces methods that exploit observability data both independently and collectively. BARO is an end-to-end anomaly detection and RCA approach for metric data. EventADL is an end-to-end framework for event data. TORAI is a multimodal RCA framework that requires no service call graph. Extensive experiments on real microservice systems demonstrate their effectiveness and robustness. The second group delivers benchmarking datasets, an evaluation framework, and systematic evaluation efforts. RCAEval is a comprehensive benchmark providing ready-to-use datasets and reproducible baselines for future research. A systematic evaluation of existing RCA methods, especially causal inference-based approaches, offers insights that guide future directions. This thesis thereby advances automated anomaly detection and RCA for microservice failures, enabling future research on incident mitigation and remediation.
Jun 5, 2026

CF-JEPA: Mask-free forward prediction with asymmetric encoder utilization for time-series representation learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for time-series representation learning is dominated by two paradigms: contrastive methods, which face challenges in constructing positive or negative pairs, and masking-based methods, which disrupt the temporal continuity of time-series signals. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) offers a promising alternative by predicting in representation space rather than reconstructing raw inputs. However, existing time-series JEPA variants still rely on masking and therefore inherit its continuity problem. Crop-based Forward JEPA (CF-JEPA) is proposed as an innovative mask-free framework that replaces masking with multi-horizon forward prediction: random crops serve as context views, and short-, mid-, and long-horizon future representations are predicted in the forward temporal direction, directly leveraging the inherent temporal ordering of time-series data as a learning signal. A strong asymmetry is also identified between the online encoder and the exponential moving average (EMA) target encoder, both produced from a single training run: the online encoder develops higher-rank discriminative features, while the EMA target encoder develops smoother, lower-rank temporal features. Exploiting this asymmetry, classification is routed to the online encoder and forecasting or anomaly detection to the EMA target encoder, achieving a 27% reduction in multivariate forecasting mean squared error (MSE) at no additional training cost. Across 126 University of California, Riverside (UCR) and 26 University of East Anglia (UEA) classification datasets, eight electricity transformer temperature forecasting benchmarks, and Key Performance Indicator /Yahoo anomaly detection, CF-JEPA achieves the highest average accuracy and rank on UCR and UEA among self-supervised baselines and ranks second on univariate forecasting and k-nearest neighbors-scored anomaly detection.
Jun 4, 2026

Attack Detection using Time Series Foundation Models

This paper addresses the problem of attack detection in cyber-physical systems without any knowledge of the plant model or its structure. A remotely located plant transmits sensor measurements to an operator over a network that is assumed to be under attack. We consider two classes of attacks: model-free replay attacks and model-based stealthy attacks. For the latter, we derive closed-form expressions for the optimal stealthy attack policy against a χ2χ^2 detector, for both linear and nonlinear systems. We then propose a model-structure-free detector based on TimesFM, a time-series foundation model developed by Google Research, which serves as a surrogate residual generator operating in a zero-shot fashion. We show empirically that the TimesFM-based detector achieves a comparable or superior attack detection performance. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated numerically on the IEEE 14-bus power system. We also demonstrate that TimesFM predictions can serve as a substitute for corrupted measurements, a practical mitigation technique when classical redundancy assumptions fail.
Jun 4, 2026

DAST: A VLM-LLM Framework for Cross-Interface Anomaly Detection in O-RAN

O-RAN enables a disaggregated baseband stack with programmable functions that communicate over standardized open interfaces. The same openness that enables multi-vendor composition also expands the attack surface across logically decoupled tiers that make up the compute continuum. Among these threats, Denial-of-Service and performance-degradation attacks, which account for the majority of catalogued O-RAN threats, are particularly difficult to detect. Traditional Time-Series Anomaly Detection (TSAD) methods fail in this new regime where labelled baselines are scarce, threats evolve faster than detectors can be retrained, and the high-dimensional multivariate telemetry overwhelms monolithic inference models. To address these challenges, we present DAST, a zero-shot multi-agent framework for cross-interface anomaly detection in O-RAN that chains a three-stage VLM →\rightarrow LLM →\rightarrow VLM pipeline. DAST converts multivariate KPI streams into visual representations, scores textual per-interface descriptions against O-RAN domain knowledge, and verifies suspects on high-resolution heatmaps to output the problematic interfaces, the anomalous time intervals, an indicative O-RAN WG11-aligned operational impact rating and the decision rationale. We evaluate DAST on real network traces collected from an O-RAN testbed under representative performance degradation scenarios, achieving 0.910 F1-Score and 0.843 Accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art TSAD baselines.
Jun 4, 2026

GenAutoML: An Agentic Framework for Dynamic Architecture Generation and Optimization in Time-Series Analysis

Designing neural architectures for time-series forecasting and anomaly detection remains a resource-intensive task that often requires substantial domain expertise. Traditional Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems typically rely on static, predefined search spaces, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse data characteristics. We present GenAutoML, an agentic framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as neural architects to bridge natural-language requirements and executable PyTorch implementations. The framework incorporates a Sandboxed Reflection Loop for autonomous code refinement and a Signature-Aware Runtime that enforces architectural consistency and execution safety. To improve robustness under non-stationary conditions, we further introduce a Dynamic Reversible Instance Normalization (Dyn-RevIN) wrapper. Experiments on the ETTh1, ETTm1, and Weather benchmarks demonstrate that GenAutoML can dynamically generate task-specific neural architectures tailored to dataset characteristics. Among the generated models, WaveInterferenceNet achieves inference latency below 0.01 ms per sample while maintaining competitive predictive performance. By emphasizing computational efficiency, architectural adaptability, and stable optimization behavior, GenAutoML enables the creation of ultra-lightweight neural networks suitable for resource-constrained and latency-sensitive Edge AI deployments.
Jun 4, 2026

T-SAR-JEPA: Self-Supervised Temporal Anomaly Detection in SAR Amplitude Stacks via Latent Prediction

We present T-SAR-JEPA, a self-supervised framework for temporal anomaly detection in SAR amplitude stacks via latent prediction. A ViT-Base/16 encoder from SAR-JEPA is domain-adapted on 39,300 Capella patches using local masked reconstruction with gradient feature prediction. A temporal transformer with sinusoidal time encoding forecasts future latent states from K=7 acquisitions, with progressive unfreezing substantially reducing validation loss. The model operates on amplitude alone; InSAR coherence serves exclusively as independent pseudo-ground-truth. On the DFC 2026 dataset (300 time-series, three AOIs), T-SAR-JEPA achieves ROC-AUC of 77.0% on the Hawaii eruption window, outperforming RX, PaDiM, Linear AR, and LSTM baselines (~50%). Spatial coherence of 99.9% (p < 0.001, permutation test) confirms structured detections. Code: https://github.com/TerraLatent/t-sar-jepa
Jun 3, 2026

Anomaly Detection for Electro-Hydrostatic Actuators using LSTM Autoencoder

Electro-Hydrostatic Actuators (EHAs) are widely used in aerospace and industrial systems, where timely detection of sensor anomalies is essential to ensure safe and reliable operation. However, the large volume and high sampling frequency of EHA sensor data pose challenges for accurate and efficient anomaly detection. Conventional statistical and classical machine-learning methods such as Z-score, Interquartile Range (IQR), Median Absolute Deviation (MAD), Isolation Forest, Gaussian Mixture, and k-means often fail to capture the temporal dependencies inherent in EHA signals, resulting in limited detection accuracy and elevated false-alarm rates. Furthermore, systematic evaluations of data-driven anomaly detection approaches for EHA systems remain scarce, particularly under varying operational conditions. This study presents an offline anomaly-detection framework for univariate EHA sensor signals, focusing on temperature and pressure data collected from a controlled test bench. The method employs a reconstruction-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) autoencoder, calibrated and evaluated using validation-set reconstruction-error distributions. Performance is assessed across multiple fault-injection scenarios using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, complemented by sensitivity analyses under varying operating conditions. The LSTM autoencoder achieved an average accuracy of 99.0%, precision up to 100%, recall between 90.2% and 99.6%, and F1-scores from 93.1% to 99.8%, demonstrating high detection sensitivity and a very low false-alarm rate across all evaluated sensors. These results highlight the feasibility of data-driven offline anomaly detection for EHAs. Future work will focus on adapting the developed framework for an online (real-time) environment.
Jun 2, 2026

Disjoint or Overlapping? Inference Windowing for Reconstruction-Based Time Series Anomaly Detection

Reconstruction-based methods are widely used for time series anomaly detection, where models are trained to reconstruct subsequences, and anomalies are identified through reconstruction errors. However, reported results are often hard to compare due to heterogeneous evaluation practices and underspecified inference procedures. In this paper, we revisit reconstruction-based anomaly detection in the univariate offline setting and study the role of the inference stride, which controls whether subsequences are processed as disjoint windows or with overlap. We propose a unified training, tuning, and multi-seed evaluation protocol on the curated TSB-AD benchmark, and study how overlapping inference affects anomaly detection performance for a range of reconstruction models, including PCA-based baselines, DLinear, an AutoEncoder, TimesNet, and Transformer variants. The results show that across all models, overlapping windows yield consistent improvements, with average relative gain up to +28%, and can alter method rankings. We further analyze variability across datasets, random seeds, and hyperparameter configurations. Finally, we complement the benchmark study with an evaluation on the full UCR archive using localization criteria aligned with sliding-window reconstruction. Overall, our results highlight that reconstruction-based anomaly detection performance depends not only on model architecture and training, but also on inference choices, motivating a clear and reproducible protocol. Our results show that reconstructionbased baselines achieve strong performance on both TSB-AD and UCR benchmarks, supporting them as competitive and practical approaches for univariate time series anomaly detection.
Jun 2, 2026

TPA-AD: A Two-Stage Pseudo Anomaly-Guided Method for Bearing Time-Series Anomaly Detection

This paper proposes a two-stage pseudo anomaly-guided anomaly detection method (Two-stage Pseudo Anomaly-guided Anomaly Detection, TPA-AD) for axle-box bearing time-series anomaly detection (time series anomaly detection, TSAD) under the setting where only normal samples are available for training. The method first generates pseudo-anomalous windows near the normal boundary using a reconstruction model and per-feature target-error control. It then learns anomaly-sensitive representations through contrastive learning between normal and pseudo-anomalous windows, and finally produces window-level and point-level anomaly scores using k-nearest neighbors (KNN). Compared with existing methods that rely on known fault categories, real anomaly priors, or random anomaly injection, TPA-AD improves the separability of the normal boundary by constructing pseudo-anomalies in boundary neighborhoods and can jointly handle continuous and discrete features in mixed-variable scenarios. The main experiments are conducted on bearing fault detection datasets and degradation-process datasets, with an additional exploratory extension on 1313 public TSAD datasets. The results show that the proposed method yields relatively stable anomaly responses, is sensitive to degradation evolution, and demonstrates a certain degree of broader applicability on public TSAD benchmarks and real high-speed-train-related bearing data.
Jun 2, 2026

Trans GAN-WT: A Feature Extraction and Interactive Learning-Based Anomaly Detection Model for Wind Turbine Time Series Data

With the increasing scale and number of wind farms, wind turbines' daily operation and maintenance costs are increasing. To reduce operation and maintenance costs and enhance the reliability of wind turbine and system operation data before reaching catastrophic failures, monitoring the operating status of the equipment and detecting failures at an early stage is crucial. It is of great practical significance to utilize the working condition data for abnormal assessment of the operating status of wind turbines to realize abnormal monitoring of the operating status of wind turbines. However, the existing anomaly detection methods can neither perform effective relational modeling in data filled with a large amount of redundant information nor reasonably utilize the valuable anomaly data. For this reason, this paper proposes an anomaly detection model that fuses a Transformer and a generative adversarial network. Firstly, it reduces the leakage detection rate of minor deviation anomalies by amplifying the reconstruction error. Secondly, it uses autoregressive inference to extract multimodal features to enhance the stability and generalization ability of training. Finally, the temporal feature extraction module is constructed to promote the interactive learning between features of different time scales and effectively reduce the time redundancy. The results of multiple sets of experiments conducted on real WTG datasets show that TransGAN-WT achieves an average F1 score of 96.10% across multiple wind turbine datasets, which is 5.84% and 2.89% higher than several other state-of-the-art baseline methods. It also realizes a false positive rate (FPR) of 0.06%, and is verified by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to have achieved a statistically significant performance enhancement compared to the state-of-the-art baseline methods, effectively ensuring the stable operation of wind turbines.
Jun 1, 2026

Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series Benchmarks Are Mostly Univariate

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.