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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Suofei, Zheng, Yaxuan, Hu, Haifeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Suofei
Zheng, Yaxuan
Hu, Haifeng
author_facet Zhang, Suofei
Zheng, Yaxuan
Hu, Haifeng
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18128
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle POST: Prior-Observation Adversarial Learning of Spatio-Temporal Associations for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
Zhang, Suofei
Zheng, Yaxuan
Hu, Haifeng
Artificial Intelligence
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.
title POST: Prior-Observation Adversarial Learning of Spatio-Temporal Associations for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18128