# A Review on Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection: Recent Advances and Open Challenges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15196/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 115 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [The UCR Time Series Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07758/) (2018)
- [Detecting Spacecraft Anomalies Using LSTMs and Nonparametric Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04431/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03407/) (2019)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)
- [Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00111/) (2021)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection Using Geometric Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10917/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training For Time Series via Time-Frequency Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08496/) (2022)
- [Multi-task Self-Supervised Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07860/) (2017)
- [A review on outlier/anomaly detection in time series data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04236/) (2020)
- [A Deep Neural Network for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis in Multivariate Time Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08055/) (2018)
- [Current Time Series Anomaly Detection Benchmarks are Flawed and are Creating the Illusion of Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13807/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Learning in Remote Sensing: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13188/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05244/) (2022)
- [DCdetector: Dual Attention Contrastive Representation Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10347/) (2023)
- [Neural Transformation Learning for Deep Anomaly Detection Beyond Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16440/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Time-Series Representation Learning with Iterative Bilinear Temporal-Spectral Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04770/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [NeuCoReClass AD: Redefining Self-Supervised Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00909/) (2025)
- [GDformer: Going Beyond Subsequence Isolation for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18196/) (2025)
- [ProtoX-AD: Self-Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection and Characterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13277/) (2026)
- [Supervision Recovery for Time Series Anomaly Detection via Context-Anchored Pairing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33610/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series anomaly detection presents various challenges due to the sequential and dynamic nature of time-dependent data. Traditional unsupervised methods frequently encounter difficulties in generalization, often overfitting to known normal patterns observed during training and struggling to adapt to unseen normality. In response to this limitation, self-supervised techniques for time series have garnered attention as a potential solution to undertake this obstacle and enhance the performance of anomaly detectors. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the recent methods that make use of self-supervised learning for time series anomaly detection. A taxonomy is proposed to categorize these methods based on their primary characteristics, facilitating a clear understanding of their diversity within this field. The information contained in this survey, along with additional details that will be periodically updated, is available on the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/Aitorzan3/Awesome-Self-Supervised-Time-Series-Anomaly-Detection.