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.

May 31, 2026

ChronosAD: Leveraging Time Series Foundation Models for Accurate Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is a crucial task in various domains, including finance, healthcare, and industry. However, existing methods often struggle to generalize across different datasets, especially when anomalies are subtle or context-dependent. To solve this issue, we introduce ChronosAD, a novel architecture for anomaly detection that uses a time series foundation model as a feature extractor. Specifically, it employs a two-stage pipeline: first, it uses the foundation model to extract embeddings for each time series in a zero-shot manner. Then, a custom-developed Temporal Block, composed of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Multi-Head Attention, refines these embeddings to capture temporal dependencies and highlight salient patterns. Unlike previous approaches, our model requires minimal task-specific tuning and demonstrates robust generalization across a wide range of domains, including industrial, medical, cyber-physical, and automotive systems. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmarks show that ChronosAD outperforms existing methods by 4.72% in AUC and 6.60% in AP on average. The source code is available at https://github.com/intelligolabs/ChronosAD.
May 29, 2026

Benchmarking Recursive-Collapse Warning Claims Under Matched False-Positive Control

Recursive systems can enter collapse-like regimes -- self-reinforcing amplification, persistent recursion, and narrowing diversity that mask accelerating internal degradation -- before overt failure becomes visible. We introduce Loopzero, a claim-bounded benchmark framework for testing whether recursive failures follow a directional telemetry pattern: rising gain (G), recursive persistence (p), and declining diversity (δδ). The claim boundary is specified in Lean; the Lean artifact does not verify real telemetry, benchmark validity, or detector performance. We evaluate the bridge on two frozen public-artifact benchmarks: a segmented public-markets benchmark (Volmageddon 2018, COVID MWCB 2020) and a MovieLens-25M offline deterministic recommender replay. Detectors are evaluated under a locked equal-false-positive contract (FP ∈\in [0.03, 0.07], pre-registered) so all configurations face the same alert budget. Neither tested standard comparators nor Loopzero's pre-registered quantile detector achieved an accepted operating point. Directional witness alignment held on both canonical benchmarks, with adjacent-horizon and row-level limitations disclosed. Digitized Shumailov et al. (2024) LLM training-loop trajectories are directionally consistent with the pattern; matched-FP evaluation in that domain is deferred. The contribution is a reproducible, falsifiable benchmark framework for evaluating recursive-collapse warning claims under an explicit alert-budget contract -- non-acceptance reported as a first-class scientific outcome.
May 29, 2026

Giving Sensors a Voice: Multimodal JEPA for Semantic Time-Series Embeddings

Transformer-based architectures have advanced sequence modeling in language and vision, yet general-purpose representation learning for heterogeneous multivariate time series remains underexplored. We introduce CHARM (Channel-Aware Representation Model), which incorporates channel-level textual descriptions into a Transformer encoder equivariant to channel order. CHARM is trained with a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and a novel loss promoting informative, temporally stable embeddings; latent-space prediction encourages robustness to sensor noise while description-aware gating provides interpretability through learned inter-channel relationships. Across anomaly detection, classification, and short- and long-term forecasting, the learned embeddings achieve strong performance using only a linear probe. Performance is driven primarily by the JEPA objective and conditioning architecture, with text descriptions serving as channel identifiers for cross-dataset generalization.
May 29, 2026

Lightweight CNN-Based Anomaly Detection for High Voltage Converter Modulators in the Spallation Neutron Source

Time series anomaly detection is central to monitoring industrial and scientific equipment, where anomalous sensor readings can precede failures. As such equipment usually carries several sensors, a detector must also decide how to model the dependencies between channels. In many physical systems, normal behaviour is defined by how groups of sensors evolve together, and an anomaly can appear as the coupling or decoupling of sensors while each signal remains normal. Anomalies in popular public benchmarks, however, are mostly visible in single channels, so these benchmarks cannot show whether modelling inter-channel dependencies improves detection. We study this on the High Voltage Converter Modulators (HVCMs) of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), whose fourteen sensors are physically coupled and whose faults are labelled by type. Keeping a convolutional neural network (CNN) fixed, we vary only whether its blocks combine channels before or after temporal filtering, and measure detection for each SNS subsystem and fault family. The effect of this choice depends on how visible each fault family is on a single channel. Families clearly visible on one channel are detected equally well by all variants, whereas weakly separable families, such as flux faults, gain consistently when channels are combined first. Modelling the dependencies between channels therefore helps only where individual channels do not already reveal the fault. The best detector reaches an average area under the precision--recall curve of 0.816, competitive with published HVCM detectors at roughly half the parameters of a standard CNN.
May 28, 2026

Tiny but Trusted: Efficient Vision-Language Reasoning for Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across many tasks, yet prior studies report unsatisfactory performance when applying large language or multimodal models to finding abnormal patterns in sequential data. Public anomaly detection benchmarks typically provide interval annotations but not natural-language rationales, making it difficult to fine-tune VLMs to produce grounded, interpretable decisions. To address this gap, we construct VisAnomBench, a curated benchmark built from public time-series datasets and augmented with high-quality anomaly explanations selected from multiple large VLMs using fine-grained, task-specific rewards. Through fine-tuning on this benchmark, we develop VisAnomReasoner, a parameter-efficient VLM for time-series anomaly detection. Experimental results on VisAnomBench show that VisAnomReasoner achieves more accurate anomaly localization and consistently outperforms all baselines, with improvements of at least 21.23 and 23.87 percentage points in precision and F1, respectively. Additional experiments on the TSB-AD-U benchmark demonstrate strong cross-benchmark generalization, with VisAnomReasoner improving precision and F1 by 9.57 and 13.39 percentage points, respectively.
May 27, 2026

Benchmarking Inductive Biases for Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection with a Robust Multi-View Channel-Graph Detector

We present a unified experiment, analysis, and benchmark study of multivariate time-series (MTS) anomaly detection. Ten family-representative detectors -- spanning statistical, reconstruction, association, frequency, and generic-transformer families -- are evaluated on five datasets (SMD, MSL, SMAP, PSM, and MSDS) under effectiveness, efficiency, robustness, and cross-dataset generalisation. All methods share the same windowing, scoring, hardware, and metric protocols. Effectiveness, ablation, and robustness use three random seeds; cross-dataset transfer uses seed~0 because each extra seed requires 250250 source-target evaluations. The benchmark yields three method-independent findings: no single-bias baseline dominates; absolute perturbation VUS-ROC is more informative than retention ratios; and MSDS behaves as an event-dense deployment workload rather than a sparse point-anomaly benchmark. Under this protocol we also introduce \ours{}, an adaptive detector family combining a NOTEARS-constrained directed channel-graph view with optional patch-attention and temporal-association views. \ours{} achieves the best macro-average VUS-ROC (0.6750.675, +5.1+5.1~pt over the second-best LSTM-AE), ranks first overall, and reaches the top-3 on all five datasets. Its wins on MSL and MSDS are narrow, while its average and robustness gains are larger: under the same three-seed robustness protocol for every method, it obtains the strongest absolute VUS-ROC across noise, channel dropout, and time-shift perturbations. We release the MSDS preprocessing protocol, configurations, scripts, and seed-level metric dumps.
May 27, 2026

Patched-DeltaNet: Token-Level Event-Driven Memory for Linear-Time Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection is critical for maintaining the reliability of mission-critical systems. While Transformer-based models like PatchTST have shown remarkable performance, their O(L2)\mathcal{O}(L^2) computational complexity severely limits deployment in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we propose Patched-DeltaNet, a novel architecture combining time-series patching with Gated Delta Networks. By integrating these paradigms, we hypothesize and demonstrate the emergence of token-level event-driven memory, whereby the patching mechanism extracts local semantic chunks, while the error-driven DeltaNet updates its recurrent state exclusively when significant physical changes, defined as deltas, occur. This synergy effectively filters out background noise and captures sudden anomalous drifts. Our rigorous experiments on the Server Machine Dataset (SMD) benchmark demonstrate the structural superiority and sample efficiency of Patched-DeltaNet. By strictly outperforming recent architectures under unified evaluation constraints and identical compute budgets, our model yields an ROC-AUC of 0.957 and PA-F1 of 0.822, while drastically reducing computational complexity to the theoretical minimum of O(L/P)\mathcal{O}(L/P).
May 26, 2026

Federated Learning for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection in Industrial Automation

Federated learning (FL) has broadened the horizon for multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD). However, benchmarking such anomaly detection methods within FL paradigm poses data-centric challenges. The existing datasets do not counteract these challenges since they do not simultaneously provide sufficient scale, accurate labels, and freedom from common flaws. In addition, the role of cyclic process behavior, which is common in discrete industrial automation, remains underexplored for MTSAD for the current state of research. This paper aims to shed more light on the literature and address these gaps by introducing a dataset designed with cyclic dynamics arising from the repetitive nature of discrete automation processes and evaluates selected MTSAD methods on both the proposed dataset and a public benchmark dataset.
May 25, 2026

Bridging Classification and Reconstruction: Cooperative Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has long been a hot research topic in data mining due to its various applications. Recent studies challenge the effectiveness of popular deep learning methods for TSAD, suggesting their failure in detecting subtle and prolonged anomalies. Outlier Exposure (OE) and Masked Autoencoder (MAE) emerge as two promising paradigms (classification and reconstruction) for solving the above problems. However, OE-based methods are constrained by poor generalization, while MAE-based methods are limited by masking misalignment issues. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework, CoAD, which unifies the two paradigms to leverage their complementary strengths while mitigating their respective weaknesses. In this framework, the classification module generates probability-informed soft masks for the reconstruction module, which in turn alleviates the generalization problem of the classification module. This cooperative design enables CoAD to effectively detect subtle and complex anomalies that are often overlooked by existing methods. Additionally, the classification module is carefully designed to resolve issues related to improper classification granularity and the neglect of frequency information. Extensive experiments on high-quality benchmark datasets, conducted under rigorous evaluation protocols, demonstrate that CoAD significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art deep learning and traditional data mining methods, highlighting the potential of deep learning in TSAD. Moreover, CoAD is lightweight and substantially faster than existing SOTA methods, demonstrating its practical value for large-scale, real-time applications.
May 24, 2026

ASTRO: Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Optimization for GNN Powered Anomly Detection in Cyber Physical Systems

Anomaly detection in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments is essential to protect the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) from occuring run time false data injection and other malicious attacks. The increasing complexity of sensor networks and interconnected control loops makes it difficult to identify anomalous behavior hidden within high-dimensional and time-dependent signals. To address these challenges, this article introduces Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Optimization ASTRO (ASTRO), a novel anomaly detection framework that pioneers the use of reinforcement learning for dynamic threshold optimization. By integrating a Deep Q-Network (DQN) with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), temporal modelling and a Multi-Head Attention mechanism, ASTRO continuously adapts its decision boundaries to improve detection accuracy. The GNN component models the spatial relations among sensors, Temporal model captures time series dependencies and the attention layer highlights most informative time steps. The model generates continuous anomaly scores, which are transformed into binary decisions using an adaptive threshold, optimized via a Deep Q-Network (DQN). The ASTRO approach is evaluated on two real world industrial benchmarks: the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) and Water Distribution (WADI) datasets. The proposed model achieves an exceptional performance on the SWaT with F1 score of 0.990. Moreover, on highly complex 127 end devices WADI dataset, it secures F1 score of 0.788, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by nearly 14%. Results across multiple runs confirm consistent generalization and stability. These experiments demonstrate that the ASTRO framework is highly practical and scalable method for strengthening the large scale cyber physical infrastructures
May 22, 2026

Contrast to Detect: Dynamic Graph Contrastive Regularization for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series (MTS) is hindered by dynamic inter-variable dependencies and feature entanglement under spectral noise, and in practice, is further complicated by the absence of anomaly labels. Existing reconstruction-based detectors tend to recover anomalies as faithfully as normal patterns, while prevailing graph contrastive methods enforce invariance across views and thus assume a stationary relational structure, an assumption that breaks under structural drift in real systems. We propose ContrastAD, an unsupervised framework that turns structural evolution itself into a learning signal rather than suppressing it. A Multi-Perspective Embedder encodes inputs from temporal, attribute, and structural perspectives. A Frequency-Aware Attention Mixer then performs spectral top-K filtering before attention, preventing noise from leaking into query-key similarities. The core component, a Dynamic Graph Contrastive Learner, builds power-law-inspired sparse graph snapshots from batch-level DTW distances and contrasts the most divergent pair against a stable anchor, regularizing the latent space without imposing rigid invariance. Across five real-world benchmarks, ContrastAD attains the highest mean F1 on all five datasets and the highest AUC on three (SWaT 93.60, SMD 98.66, PSM 97.79), with statistically significant F1 and AUC margins over the strongest baseline on SWaT and PSM. On MSL and SMAP, it trails the AUC leader by under 0.7 points while still leading on F1. Ablation and sensitivity studies further confirm that the contrastive objective works best as a soft regularizer, supporting our claim that strict invariance is suboptimal under non-stationary dynamics.
May 22, 2026

VACE: Learning Geometrically Structured Representations for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is a critical task across a wide range of real-world applications, where abnormal behaviour is rare, labels are unavailable, and the cost of a miss is high. The central challenge is learning a characterisation of normality precise enough to flag deviations. Representation self-supervised learning, typically through contrastive approaches, addresses this by embedding temporal patches into a latent space where normality occupies a well-defined region, with anomalies detected by geometric deviation. However, contrastive approaches shape this space indirectly through pair-sampling heuristics, providing no explicit control over the geometric structure that distance-based scoring requires. This means how tightly normal representations are grouped, and whether distances are directionally meaningful. We present VACE (Velocity-Aligned Channel Embeddings), a self-supervised anomaly detection method that represents normality as a compact, directionally coherent region in the embedding space. To this end, VACE trains a channel-aware encoder through a velocity-consistency objective, with no negatives and no synthetic anomalies, so that normal trajectories are locally smooth and aligned. At test time, a Mahalanobis positional score and a velocity-bank directional score are combined multiplicatively, flagging points that are simultaneously off-distribution and dynamically atypical. Despite its simplicity, VACE achieves state-of-the-art performance on TSB-AD-M under rigorous evaluation, significantly outperforming more complex methods trained on substantially larger budgets.
May 22, 2026

CALAD: Channel-Aware contrastive Learning for multivariate time series Anomaly Detection

Multivariate time series anomaly detection has become increasingly important in real-world applications, where labeled data are often scarce. Many existing approaches rely on unsupervised learning to model normal patterns, but they often treat all channels equally. This design can dilute anomaly-relevant signals, since not all channels contribute equally to anomaly detection. In this paper, we propose CALAD, a channel-aware contrastive learning framework for multivariate time series anomaly detection. CALAD governs the construction of contrastive samples using estimated channel relevance, allowing the learning process to reflect anomaly semantics rather than generic similarity. Channel relevance is estimated from reconstruction errors of a transformer-based autoencoder and is used to distinguish channels that are more influential to anomalous behaviors. Using this information, we design a channel-wise augmentation strategy in which positive and negative samples are constructed based on whether anomaly-relevant channels are preserved or perturbed. This encourages invariance to changes in irrelevant channels while being sensitive to changes in anomaly-relevant channels. Furthermore, CALAD combines contrastive learning and an auxiliary reconstruction head, allowing the model to learn discriminative representations while retaining normal structures. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets shows that CALAD consistently outperforms existing methods, particularly under distribution shift scenarios. We provide the code for reproducibility at https://github.com/hirundo1218/CALAD
May 21, 2026

Self-Supervised ConvLSTM for Fermi Large Area Telescope Transient Detection

We present a framework for detecting transient gamma-ray phenomena in a controlled environment by combining end-to-end simulations of the Fermi-LAT sky with self-supervised spatio-temporal deep learning. We generate a ten-year synthetic Universe with gtobssim and process the simulated events into daily all-sky maps of counts and exposure, obtaining a time-ordered sequence that mirrors the structure of Fermi-LAT observations. To model the nominal evolution of the sky, we employ a Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) network that operates directly on map sequences, preserving spatial locality while learning temporal dependencies. The model is trained to reconstruct expected emission, and departures from the learned baseline are quantified through pixel-wise mean-squared residual maps. We then define statistically motivated anomaly criteria by estimating per-pixel thresholds from the residual distribution on the training set, and we enforce spatial coherence via local filtering to suppress isolated fluctuations. The ConvLSTM is then deployed as trained predictor on Fermi-LAT daily maps, where the sky can depart from the nominal behavior because of genuine astrophysical variability and instrumental non-stationarities. The resulting pipeline flags localized, time-dependent excesses consistent with high-variable sources or transient events (e.g., flares or GRBs) and provides a benchmark for evaluating anomaly-detection strategies on long-duration, Fermi-LAT-like datasets.
May 19, 2026

Latent Geometry as a Structural Monitor: Eigenspace Alignment for Anomaly Detection in Anonymity Networks

Traditional anomaly detection marks events when measured signals cross predefined thresholds. This captures the moment of transition but not the structural pressure that precedes it. We propose treating large behavioral populations as geometric energy landscapes whose deformation can be measured before and during major transitions. The central thesis is that structure precedes geometry: the structural organization of the population is the signal, and geometric metrics are instruments for measuring it. Applied to the Tor anonymity network across 67 consecutive daily observation windows, the dual-observer pipeline identifies a stable nine-dimensional load-bearing subspace invariant across the observation period and validates this structure by Monte Carlo simulation at 16.8 sigma above the noise floor. Primary detection gates achieve 0.0% false positive rate on 24 confirmed stable windows. Forensic analysis of the February 20, 2026 confirmed infrastructure event formally falsifies the relay-departure hypothesis, identifying connectivity degradation without topology change as a detectable network failure mode. The result is a candidate structural-monitoring framework for behavioral populations with sufficient telemetry.
May 18, 2026

UTOPYA: A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework for Physics-Informed Anomaly Detection and Time-Series Prediction

Anomaly detection in batch processes is hindered by transient dynamics, scarce fault labels, and reliance on single-modality sensor data. This work introduces UTOPYA (Unified Temporal Observation for Physics-Informed Anomaly Detection and Time-Series Prediction), a 15.2M-parameter multimodal framework that jointly addresses anomaly detection, time-series prediction, and phase classification in batch distillation by fusing eight data modalities through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) conditioned cross-modal attention and gated fusion. A physics-informed regularisation scheme introduced in this work enforces temporal smoothness and thermodynamic monotonicity, while curriculum learning introduces training samples in order of physical difficulty. On the 119-experiment multimodal batch distillation dataset of Arweiler et al. (2026), UTOPYA achieves a window-level test AUROC of 0.832 and 0.874 under multi-signal experiment-level scoring, substantially outperforming four external baselines (PCA, autoencoder, Isolation Forest, and LSTM autoencoder) evaluated under identical conditions (+0.147 window-level AUROC over the best baseline). A multimodal ablation over 15~architectural configurations shows that static context via FiLM conditioning is the key enabler, lifting experiment-level multi-signal AUROC by +0.145 over the unimodal baseline (0.729 to 0.874). Separately, a training ablation across 14 design choices reveals that several widely-adopted techniques, including instance normalisation, Mixup, ensembling, test-time augmentation, and stochastic weight averaging, fail to improve or actively degrade generalisation in this data-scarce setting. These negative results expose a fundamental tension between smoothing-based regularisation and anomaly detection, providing practical guidance for multimodal process monitoring deployment.
May 18, 2026

POST: Prior-Observation Adversarial Learning of Spatio-Temporal Associations for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Existing Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection (MTSAD) frameworks increasingly rely on integrating Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with sequence models to capture complex spatio-temporal dependencies. However, less attention is paid to the spatial over-generalization problem, where unconstrained structural modeling indiscriminately reconstructs anomalies, inevitably degrading detection recall. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel framework that unifies spatio-temporal modeling through a joint prior-observation adversarial learning paradigm. In the spatial dimension, the model alternately learns adjacency matrices as structural prior and models the association discrepancy between prior and data-driven observation in a minimax manner during training. Such adversarial optimization not only improves the model sensitivity for time-wise detection, but also enables the model to localize anomalies to specific channels. To systematically evaluate this anomaly localization capability, we further construct a synthetic benchmark equipped with precise channel-wise annotations. Extensive experiments across public datasets and our dedicated benchmark demonstrate that the proposed framework establishes a new state-of-the-art in both time-wise detection and spatial localization tasks. Our code, pre-trained models, and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/anocodetest1/POST.
May 17, 2026

Causal Anomaly Detection for Lithium-Ion Battery Degradation

Reliable early detection of lithium-ion battery degradation requires health indicators that are physically interpretable and computable from routine cycler telemetry without access to the degradation region. We introduce CausalHealth, a framework that applies causal graph discovery and kk-nearest-neighbour transfer entropy to per-cycle voltage, current, temperature, and resistance time series, and organises twelve resulting anomaly scores into three signal-class bundles (Magnitude-shift, Predictive-residual, Complexity-entropy) -- with Isolation Forest reported separately as it falls below the bundle reliability threshold -- to characterise detection sensitivity across ten commissioning fractions (5--30,%). The Magnitude-shift class achieves 100,% detection across all seven tested cells spanning LFP (MIT--Stanford MATR) and LCO (NASA PCoE, CALCE CS2) chemistries, with a lead time of up to 402 cycles before conventional capacity-threshold failure on gradual-fade cells. A Reliability-Weighted Master Health Index (RWMHI) -- a cross-bundle fusion of five high-reliability detectors weighted by inverse coefficient of variation -- improves lead time by 15--52 cycles over the class median on long-lived cells while maintaining 100,% detection. Validation against electrochemical impedance spectroscopy on an NMC prismatic cell provides independent physical grounding: transfer entropy TE(R ⁣→ ⁣V)\mathrm{TE}(R \!\to\! V) correlates with charge-transfer resistance RctR_{\mathrm{ct}} (pooled r=+0.990r = +0.990; temperature-controlled partial r=+0.898r = +0.898), and an Arrhenius analysis of both quantities yields an activation energy consistent with published NMC charge-transfer kinetics. These results are evaluated on seven cells across three benchmark datasets.
May 17, 2026

Latency-Aware Deep Learning Benchmark for Real-Time Cyber-Physical Attack and Fault Classification in Inverter-Dominated Power Grids

This work introduces a latency-aware benchmarking framework for evaluating deep learning models in power system anomaly detection using high-fidelity, time-domain signals generated from an industry-grade electromagnetic transient simulator. Eight neural network architectures, ranging from MLPs to Transformers, were systematically evaluated on streaming datasets representing both physical faults and cyber-attacks in inverter-dominated networks. All models successfully classified two representative multi-event sequences in real time with sub-cycle response times below 15 ms. However, although classification decisions occurred within one cycle, the end-to-end inference latency consistently exceeded three cycles, ranging from 50 to 90 ms. These results highlight a critical gap between algorithmic capability and protection-grade deployment, pointing to the need for further optimization and hardware acceleration. The findings establish a reproducible benchmark for sub-cycle anomaly detection and provide guidance for transitioning machine learning methods from research prototypes to real-world protection applications.
May 13, 2026

Uncertainty-Driven Anomaly Detection for Psychotic Relapse Using Smartwatches: Forecasting and Multi-Task Learning Fusion

Digital phenotyping enables continuous passive monitoring of behavior and physiology, offering a promising paradigm for early detection of psychotic relapse. In this work, we develop and systematically study two smartwatch-based frameworks for daily relapse detection. The first forecasts cardiac dynamics and flags deviations between predicted and observed features as indicators of abnormality. The second adopts a multi-task formulation that fuses sleep with motion and cardiac-derived signals, learning time-aware embeddings and predicting measurement timing. Both pipelines use Transformer encoders and output a daily anomaly score, derived from predictive uncertainty estimated via an ensemble of multilayer perceptrons to improve robustness to real-world wearable variability. While each framework independently demonstrates strong predictive power, we show that they capture complementary physiological signatures. Consequently, we propose a late-fusion strategy that synergistically combines the anomaly signals from both architectures into a unified decision score. We benchmark our methodology on the 2nd e-Prevention Grand Challenge dataset, where our fused model achieves a 8% relative improvement over the competition-winning baseline. Our results, supported by extensive ablation studies, suggest that the integration of diverse digital phenotypes, cardiac, motion, and sleep, is essential for the high-fidelity detection of psychotic relapse in real-world settings.
May 10, 2026

Learning Unified Representations of Normalcy for Time Series Anomaly Detection

The core challenge in unsupervised anomaly detection is identifying abnormal patterns without prior knowledge of their characteristics. While existing methods have addressed aspects of this problem, they often struggle to learn a robust representation of the normal data distribution that is distinct from anomalous patterns. In this paper, we present a novel framework, Unified Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (U2AD\text{U}^2\text{AD}), that comprehensively addresses anomaly detection in multivariate time series. Our approach learns the underlying data distribution of normal samples by utilizing score-based generative modeling. We introduce a novel time-dependent score network and a unified training objective that together delineate the manifold of normal data while considering both local and global temporal contexts. Reconstruction is then performed via a deterministic sampling process using an ordinary differential equation solver. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that U2AD\text{U}^2\text{AD} not only outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in detection accuracy but also identifies anomalies at significantly earlier stages of their occurrence.
May 9, 2026

FactoryNet: A Large-Scale Dataset toward Industrial Time-Series Foundation Models

Industrial machines are actuated systems, yet most open time-series corpora record sensor outcomes alone; the few that do log commanded signals expose them in vendor-specific forms that differ from machine to machine, so commanded intent and measured response cannot be compared across embodiments. We introduce FactoryNet, a pretraining corpus for industrial time-series: 113M datapoints across 57k end-to-end task executions (15k real, 42k synthetic) on seven embodiments and four tasks, with 27 annotated anomaly types alongside healthy baselines and counterfactual pairs. Every signal in every source is mapped into a single control-theoretic schema, Setpoint, Effort, Feedback, Context (S-E-F-C), which expresses any actuated system in a common representational frame and makes commanded-versus-realized dynamics readable as explicit prediction residuals. Using the corpus, we find that a task-phase model trained on simulation, with no real phase labels, recovers roughly two thirds of the real-data ceiling on both robots, and that transfer holds within a robot family but rarely across manufacturers. Fault signatures behave differently: an uncalibrated simulator gives no detectable fault signal on either robot, and aligning the feature distributions does not repair it. What separation there is comes from Effort: motor current distinguishes faults where measured tool motion is close to chance, and calibrating the simulator to reproduce that one channel recovers a payload fault on the real robot. We read this as simulation capturing the stable structure of a task while fault behaviour stays diverse and fault-type specific. We release FactoryNet as a growing, multi-embodiment substrate for industrial foundation models.
May 9, 2026

Transformer autoencoder with local attention for sparse and irregular time series with application on risk estimation

This paper introduces a framework specifically designed for sparse and irregular time series {risk estimation}. It is based on a Transformer Autoencoder with local attention, which leverages the powerful pattern identification capabilities of transformers complemented by traditional data cleaning and normalization methods. It efficiently captures relevant patterns within irregular sequences suffering from sparse data collection, benefiting from the discriminative ability of the local attention mechanism. The proposed framework is applied to a real-world case study, on the risk estimation of non-technical losses in electrical power systems in a wide area in Greece. Non-technical losses in electrical power systems, primarily stemming from electricity theft, pose significant economic and operational challenges. Detecting these anomalies is particularly challenging due to the inherent sparse and irregular nature of real-world data collection practices. Traditional risk estimation methods struggle with effectively capturing long-range dependencies and robustly handling such data characteristics. We demonstrate that our approach effectively yields highly discriminative latent features, which results in more consistent risk estimation compared with existing state-of-the-art and widely used methods. It achieves high recall and precision, meeting the critical objectives of the problem. As such, our solution offers a robust and effective tool for risk detection in irregular time series datasets.
May 8, 2026

On the Tradeoffs of On-Device Generative Models in Federated Predictive Maintenance Systems

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for preserving client data ownership and control over distributed Internet of Things (IoT) environments. While discriminative models dominate most FL use cases, recent advances in generative models - such as Variational Autoencoders (VAE), Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), and Diffusion Models (DM) - offer new opportunities for unsupervised anomaly detection in time series analysis, with relevant applications in predictive maintenance (PdM) in critical industrial infrastructures. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of VAEs, GANs, and DMs in the context of federated PdM. We analyze their performance and communication overhead under both full and partial federation setups, where only subsets of model components are shared. Building on split-parameter personalized FL, this paper provides an empirical instantiation of shared/private parameter partitioning for unsupervised generative Time-Series Anomaly Detection (TSAD), mapping the split to analysis and synthesis modules across the generative architectures. Our experiments over five clients and two industrial time-series benchmarks reveal distinct trade-offs in model utility, stability, and communication efficiency in heterogeneous cross-silo FL. For the evaluated GAN-based configurations, full federation improves final anomaly-detection utility relative to independent local training, although these models remain less robust than the VAE- and DDPM-based alternatives. For DMs, decoder sharing matches full federation while substantially reducing the communication payload.
May 8, 2026

Fortifying Time Series: DTW-Certified Robust Anomaly Detection

Time-series anomaly detection is critical for ensuring safety in high-stakes applications, where robustness is a fundamental requirement rather than a mere performance metric. Addressing the vulnerability of these systems to adversarial manipulation is therefore essential. Existing defenses are largely heuristic or provide certified robustness only under ℓp\ell_p-norm constraints, which are incompatible with time-series data. In particular, ℓp\ell_p-norm fails to capture the intrinsic temporal structure in time series, causing small temporal distortions to significantly alter the ℓp\ell_p-norm measures. Instead, the similarity metric Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is more suitable and widely adopted in the time-series domain, as DTW accounts for temporal alignment and remains robust to temporal variations. To date, however, there has been no certifiable robustness result in this metric that provides guarantees. In this work, we introduce the first DTW-certified robust defense in time-series anomaly detection by adapting the randomized smoothing paradigm. We develop this certificate by bridging the ℓp\ell_p-norm to DTW distance through a lower-bound transformation. Extensive experiments across various datasets and models validate the effectiveness and practicality of our theoretical approach. Results demonstrate significantly improved performance, e.g., up to 18.7% in F1-score under DTW-based adversarial attacks compared to traditional certified models.
May 7, 2026

Detecting Time Series Anomalies Like an Expert: A Multi-Agent LLM Framework with Specialized Analyzers

Recent studies have explored large language models for time-series anomaly detection, yet existing approaches often rely on a single general-purpose model to directly infer anomaly indices or intervals, limiting controllability, interpretability, and reliability for complex anomaly patterns. We propose SAGE (Specialized Analyzer Group for Expert-like Detection), a multi-agent framework for structured anomaly diagnosis in univariate time series. It decomposes anomaly analysis into four specialized Analyzers for point, structural, seasonal, and pattern anomalies. Each Analyzer applies family-specific numerical tools and diagnostic visualizations to generate evidence, while an evidence-grounded Detector consolidates the evidence into confidence-scored anomaly records with intervals and candidate types. A Supervisor then converts these structured records into analyst-facing diagnostic reports. SAGE further constructs synthetic in-context examples from normal-reference training segments, without using real anomalous segments or anomaly-type labels as in-context examples. Across three benchmarks, SAGE achieves the best average performance among strong ML/DL and language-model-based baselines. Ablation studies and human evaluation further show that the proposed framework improves detection reliability and the practical usefulness of diagnostic outputs.
May 4, 2026

WATCH: Wide-Area Archaeological Site Tracking for Change Detection

Monitoring archaeological sites at scale is vital for protecting cultural heritage, yet pinpointing when disturbances occur remains difficult because visual cues are subtle and ground-truth data are sparse. We introduce WATCH, a framework for month-level change-event localization over PlanetScope satellite mosaics (2017-2024, 4.7 m/px) that supports three complementary scoring approaches: (i) Temporal Embedding Distance (TED), a training-free method that scores month-to-month deviations from a local temporal reference; (ii) Self-Supervised Change Detection (SSCD), an ensemble of reconstruction, forecasting, and latent-novelty signals; and (iii) a Weakly Supervised (WS) temporal localization model trained with sparse event-month labels. We benchmark WATCH on 1,943 archaeological sites in Afghanistan using embeddings from six foundation models (CLIP, GeoRSCLIP, SatMAE, Prithvi-EO-2.0, DINOv3, and Satlas-Pretrain) alongside a handcrafted spectral and texture baseline, and assess cross-regional generalization on sites in Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt. The unsupervised approaches (TED, SSCD) consistently outperform the weakly supervised alternative. TED with SatMAE achieves the highest exact-month recall (55% at m=0), while TED with GeoRSCLIP, CLIP, or Satlas-Pretrain reaches 92.5% within a three-month tolerance (m=3). Handcrafted features remain competitive for exact-month detection under weak supervision. Our directional margin analysis reveals systematic temporal biases: SSCD paired with GeoRSCLIP or Prithvi-EO-2.0 exhibits the strongest early-warning profile, detecting anomalies before the recorded event, while TED favors confirmation-oriented detection after a change has materialized. These results show that satellite imagery combined with foundation-model embeddings enables scalable, decision-relevant heritage monitoring. Code: https://github.com/microsoft/WATCH
May 1, 2026

Scalable Context-Aware Graph Attention for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Large-Scale Mobile Networks

Mobile network operators must monitor thousands of heterogeneous network elements across the radio access network and the packet core, each exposing high-dimensional KPI time series. The scale and cost of incident labelling make supervised approaches impractical, motivating unsupervised anomaly detection robust to context shifts and nonstationarity. We propose C-MTAD-GAT (Context-aware Multivariate Time-series Anomaly Detection with Graph Attention), an anomaly detection framework designed to operate as a single shared model across large populations of network elements. The model combines temporal and feature-wise graph attention with lightweight static and dynamic context conditioning and a dual-head decoder for reconstruction and multi-step forecasting. It produces per-element, per-feature anomaly scores, converted to alerts via fully unsupervised thresholds calibrated from validation residuals. On the TELCO dataset released with DC-VAE \cite{garcia2023onemodel}, C-MTAD-GAT improves event-level affiliation and pointwise F1 while generating fewer alarms than prior graph-attention and VAE-based baselines. We then apply the same system to nation-scale radio access and evolved packet core control-plane counter data from a mobile network operator, where it is deployed. Operator feedback indicates the alerts are actionable and support daily monitoring, showing scalability across domains without relying on labelled incidents.
Apr 30, 2026

Selfie-Capture Dynamics as an Auxiliary Signal Against Deepfakes and Injection Attacks for Mobile Identity Verification

Mobile remote identity verification (RIdV) systems are exposed to attacks that manipulate or replace the facial video stream, including presentation attacks, real-time deepfakes, and video injection. Recent European requirements, including ETSI TS 119 461 and CEN/TS 18099, motivate evidence channels beyond camera-based presentation-attack detection. This paper studies whether passive motion traces recorded during selfie capture provide auxiliary evidence for spoof screening and user verification. We introduce CanSelfie, a dataset of 375 bona fide multi-sensor sequences collected at 50 Hz from 30 participants using a commercial mobile RIdV application, together with stationary, handheld, and temporally shifted attack-proxy scenarios. We benchmark 7 multivariate time-series classifiers and 8 whole-series anomaly detectors across sensor configurations and temporal windows. For spoof screening, accelerometer-only ROCKAD obtains 0.00% FRR and 43.8% FAR, while QUANT+3-NN obtains the lowest FAR of 32.0% at 2.37% FRR; both reject all stationary proxies. For same-device and same-session user verification, WEASEL+MUSE reaches 1.07% EER using 9 channels. Raw acceleration is the most informative modality, and closed-set accuracy alone does not imply good verification because threshold calibration depends on score distributions. The findings support selfie-capture motion as a low-friction auxiliary signal, while leaving cross-device, cross-session, and real injection-attack evaluation as necessary next steps. Code and data available at: https://github.com/Ergzar/Selfie-Motion-AD-TSC.
Apr 30, 2026

PhaseNet++: Phase-Aware Frequency-Domain Anomaly Detection for Industrial Control Systems via Phase Coherence Graphs

Multivariate time series anomaly detection in ICS has attracted growing attention due to the increasing threat of cyber-physical attacks on critical infrastructure. State-of-the-art methods model inter-sensor relationships from raw time-domain amplitude values, using graph neural networks, Transformers. However, these methods discard the phase spectrum produced by time frequency transformations, We argue that phase information constitutes a complementary and previously overlooked detection modality for ICS anomaly detection. We present PhaseNet++, a frequency-domain autoencoder that operates on the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) of sliding sensor windows, retaining both magnitude and phase spectra. A Phase Coherence Index (PCI), inspired by the Phase Locking Value from neuroscience, summarizes pairwise phase consistency across frequency bins into a continuous adjacency matrix. This matrix guides a graph attention network that propagates information preferentially among phase-synchronized sensors. A sensor-token Transformer encoder captures system-wide structure, and a dual-head decoder reconstructs magnitude and phase jointly via circular and coherence-aware objectives. Evaluated on the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) benchmark, PhaseNet++ achieves an F1-score of 90.98%, ROC-AUC of 95.66%, and average precision of 91.51%. Ablation studies show that the phase-aware front-end and PCI graph module together add only 264,816 parameters, demonstrating that the phase inductive bias is lightweight. While the absolute F1-score is second best than that of all recent raw-value methods evaluated under different protocols, we position this work as the first systematic study of phase-domain anomaly detection for ICS.