Temporal Source Recovery for Time-Series Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Time-Series (TS) data has grown in importance with the rise of Internet of Things devices like sensors, but its labeling remains costly and complex. While Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDAs) offers an effective solution, growing data privacy concerns have led to the development of Source-Free UDA (SFUDAs), enabling model adaptation to target domains without accessing source data. Despite their potential, applying existing SFUDAs to TS data is challenging due to the difficulty of transferring temporal dependencies, an essential characteristic of TS data, particularly in the absence of source samples. Although prior works attempt to address this by specific source pretraining designs, such requirements are often impractical, as source data owners cannot be expected to adhere to particular pretraining schemes. To address this, we propose Temporal Source Recovery (TemSR), a framework that leverages the intrinsic properties of TS data to generate a source-like domain and recover source temporal dependencies. With this domain, TemSR enables dependency transfer to the target domain without accessing source data or relying on source-specific designs, thereby facilitating effective and practical TS-SFUDA. TemSR features a masking recovery optimization process to generate a source-like distribution with restored temporal dependencies. This distribution is further refined through local context-aware regularization to preserve local dependencies, and anchor-based recovery diversity maximization to promote distributional diversity. Together, these components enable effective temporal dependency recovery and facilitate transfer across domains using standard UDA techniques. Extensive experiments across multiple TS tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of TemSR, which even surpasses existing TS-SFUDA methods that require source-specific designs.