# Self-Distilled Representation Learning for Time Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11335 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11335/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Deep learning for time series classification: a review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04356/) (2018)
- [Transformers in Time Series: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07125/) (2022)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [Time Series Forecasting With Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13408/) (2020)
- [A Transformer-based Framework for Multivariate Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02803/) (2020)
- [The UCR Time Series Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07758/) (2018)
- [Time-Series Representation Learning via Temporal and Contextual Contrasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14112/) (2021)
- [The UEA multivariate time series classification archive, 2018](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00075/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Scalable Representation Learning for Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10738/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning for Time Series with Temporal Neighborhood Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00750/) (2021)
- [Efficient Self-supervised Learning with Contextualized Target Representations for Vision, Speech and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07525/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Analysis: Taxonomy, Progress, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10125/) (2023)
- [Ti-MAE: Self-Supervised Masked Time Series Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08871/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Time-Series Pre-Trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10716/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [AimTS: Augmented Series and Image Contrastive Learning for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09993/) (2025)
- [Smooth-Distill: A Self-distillation Framework for Multitask Learning with Wearable Sensor Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00061/) (2025)
- [Learning Time-Series Representations by Hierarchical Uniformity-Tolerance Latent Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01658/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning for time-series data holds potential similar to that recently unleashed in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. While most existing works in this area focus on contrastive learning, we propose a conceptually simple yet powerful non-contrastive approach, based on the data2vec self-distillation framework. The core of our method is a student-teacher scheme that predicts the latent representation of an input time series from masked views of the same time series. This strategy avoids strong modality-specific assumptions and biases typically introduced by the design of contrastive sample pairs. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach for classification and forecasting as downstream tasks, comparing with state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods on the UCR and UEA archives as well as the ETT and Electricity datasets.
