# Towards a General Time Series Anomaly Detector with Adaptive Bottlenecks and Dual Adversarial Decoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15273 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15273/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2024.

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

- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [Unified Training of Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02592/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07820/) (2023)
- [MOMENT: A Family of Open Time-series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03885/) (2024)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [Detecting Spacecraft Anomalies Using LSTMs and Nonparametric Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04431/) (2018)
- [Anomaly Transformer: Time Series Anomaly Detection with Association Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02642/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03407/) (2019)
- [Monash Time Series Forecasting Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06643/) (2021)
- [TFB: Towards Comprehensive and Fair Benchmarking of Time Series Forecasting Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20150/) (2024)
- [A Multimodal Anomaly Detector for Robot-Assisted Feeding Using an LSTM-based Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00614/) (2017)
- [MAD-GAN: Multivariate Anomaly Detection for Time Series Data with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04997/) (2019)
- [Time-Series Anomaly Detection Service at Microsoft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03821/) (2019)
- [TimeGPT-1](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03589/) (2023)
- [Current Time Series Anomaly Detection Benchmarks are Flawed and are Creating the Illusion of Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13807/) (2020)
- [UniTime: A Language-Empowered Unified Model for Cross-Domain Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09751/) (2023)
- [SimMTM: A Simple Pre-Training Framework for Masked Time-Series Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00861/) (2023)
- [Learning Graph Structures with Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection in IoT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03466/) (2021)
- [ForecastPFN: Synthetically-Trained Zero-Shot Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01933/) (2023)
- [DCdetector: Dual Attention Contrastive Representation Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10347/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Analysis: Taxonomy, Progress, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10125/) (2023)
- [How Does Information Bottleneck Help Deep Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18887/) (2023)
- [Local Evaluation of Time Series Anomaly Detection Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13167/) (2022)
- [Exathlon: A Benchmark for Explainable Anomaly Detection over Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05073/) (2020)
- [Time Series Contrastive Learning with Information-Aware Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11911/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Time Series Outlier Detection with Diversity-Driven Convolutional Ensembles -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11108/) (2021)
- [MEMTO: Memory-guided Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02530/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [CATCH: Channel-Aware multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection via Frequency Patching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12261/) (2024)
- [TAB: Unified Benchmarking of Time Series Anomaly Detection Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18046/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Time Series Forecasting through Selective Representation Spaces: A Patch Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14510/) (2025)
- [Air Quality Prediction with Physics-Guided Dual Neural ODEs in Open Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19892/) (2024)
- [TimeART: Towards Agentic Time Series Reasoning via Tool-Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13653/) (2026)
- [Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Science: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13502/) (2025)
- [CrossAD: Time Series Anomaly Detection with Cross-scale Associations and Cross-window Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12489/) (2025)
- [Towards Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Time Series Anomaly Detection: Leveraging Synthetic Data and Relative Context Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21190/) (2025)
- [Learning Generalizable Skills from Offline Multi-Task Data for Multi-Agent Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21200/) (2025)
- [STAR: Boosting Time Series Foundation Models for Anomaly Detection through State-aware Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16014/) (2025)
- [SEMPO: Lightweight Foundation Models for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19710/) (2025)
- [PaAno: Patch-Based Representation Learning for Time-Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01359/) (2026)
- [AimTS: Augmented Series and Image Contrastive Learning for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09993/) (2025)
- [Towards One-for-All Anomaly Detection for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14407/) (2026)
- [Patch-based Memory Gate Model in Time Series Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18751/) (2025)
- [AXIS: Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24378/) (2025)
- [Empowering Time Series Analysis with Large-Scale Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05646/) (2026)
- [Towards Multimodal Time Series Anomaly Detection with Semantic Alignment and Condensed Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21612/) (2026)
- [Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series Benchmarks Are Mostly Univariate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02670/) (2026)
- [Data Driven Decision Making with Time Series and Spatio-temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08473/) (2025)
- [RATFM: Retrieval-augmented Time Series Foundation Model for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02081/) (2025)
- [RED-F: Reconstruction-Elimination based Dual-stream Contrastive Forecasting for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20044/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Intermediate Representations of Time Series Foundation Models for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12650/) (2025)
- [THEMIS: Unlocking Pretrained Knowledge with Foundation Model Embeddings for Anomaly Detection in Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03911/) (2025)
- [AnomSeer: Reinforcing Multimodal LLMs to Reason for Time-Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08868/) (2026)
- [VETime: Vision Enhanced Zero-Shot Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16681/) (2026)
- [Selective Denoising Diffusion Model for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23662/) (2026)
- [VAN-AD: Visual Masked Autoencoder with Normalizing Flow For Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26842/) (2026)
- [IMPACT: Influence Modeling for Open-Set Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29183/) (2026)
- [VACE: Learning Geometrically Structured Representations for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23504/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series anomaly detection plays a vital role in a wide range of applications. Existing methods require training one specific model for each dataset, which exhibits limited generalization capability across different target datasets, hindering anomaly detection performance in various scenarios with scarce training data. Aiming at this problem, we propose constructing a general time series anomaly detection model, which is pre-trained on extensive multi-domain datasets and can subsequently apply to a multitude of downstream scenarios. The significant divergence of time series data across different domains presents two primary challenges in building such a general model: (1) meeting the diverse requirements of appropriate information bottlenecks tailored to different datasets in one unified model, and (2) enabling distinguishment between multiple normal and abnormal patterns, both are crucial for effective anomaly detection in various target scenarios. To tackle these two challenges, we propose a General time series anomaly Detector with Adaptive Bottlenecks and Dual Adversarial Decoders (DADA), which enables flexible selection of bottlenecks based on different data and explicitly enhances clear differentiation between normal and abnormal series. We conduct extensive experiments on nine target datasets from different domains. After pre-training on multi-domain data, DADA, serving as a zero-shot anomaly detector for these datasets, still achieves competitive or even superior results compared to those models tailored to each specific dataset. The code is made available at https://github.com/decisionintelligence/DADA.