LGJan 30

Unconditional flow-based time series generation with equivariance-regularised latent spaces

arXiv:2601.22848v1
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This work addresses a domain-specific problem for time-series generative modeling, offering incremental improvements by incorporating geometric inductive biases into latent flow models.

The paper tackled the problem of designing latent representations with desirable equivariance properties for time-series generation, proposing a latent flow-matching framework with equivariance regularization that improved generation quality and achieved orders-of-magnitude faster sampling compared to diffusion-based baselines.

Flow-based models have proven successful for time-series generation, particularly when defined in lower-dimensional latent spaces that enable efficient sampling. However, how to design latent representations with desirable equivariance properties for time-series generative modelling remains underexplored. In this work, we propose a latent flow-matching framework in which equivariance is explicitly encouraged through a simple regularisation of a pre-trained autoencoder. Specifically, we introduce an equivariance loss that enforces consistency between transformed signals and their reconstructions, and use it to fine-tune latent spaces with respect to basic time-series transformations such as translation and amplitude scaling. We show that these equivariance-regularised latent spaces improve generation quality while preserving the computational advantages of latent flow models. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing diffusion-based baselines in standard time-series generation metrics, while achieving orders-of-magnitude faster sampling. These results highlight the practical benefits of incorporating geometric inductive biases into latent generative models for time series.

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