# Diffusion Transformers for Tabular Data Time Series Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07566 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07566/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 32 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00503/) (2019)
- [Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05379/) (2021)
- [TabDDPM: Modelling Tabular Data with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15421/) (2022)
- [Language Models are Realistic Tabular Data Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06280/) (2022)
- [Generating Multi-label Discrete Patient Records using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06490/) (2017)
- [Mixed-Type Tabular Data Synthesis with Score-based Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09656/) (2023)
- [Data Synthesis based on Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03384/) (2018)
- [Can Foundation Models Wrangle Your Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09911/) (2022)
- [DECAF: Generating Fair Synthetic Data Using Causally-Aware Generative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12884/) (2021)
- [REaLTabFormer: Generating Realistic Relational and Tabular Data using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02041/) (2023)
- [STaSy: Score-based Tabular data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04018/) (2022)
- [FiT: Flexible Vision Transformer for Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12376/) (2024)
- [CoDi: Co-evolving Contrastive Diffusion Models for Mixed-type Tabular Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12654/) (2023)
- [Tabular Transformers for Modeling Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01843/) (2020)
- [Diffusion models for missing value imputation in tabular data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17128/) (2022)
- [Synthcity: facilitating innovative use cases of synthetic data in different data modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07573/) (2023)
- [Boosting Deep Learning Risk Prediction with Generative Adversarial Networks for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01648/) (2017)
- [TabMT: Generating tabular data with masked transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06089/) (2023)
- [SOS: Score-based Oversampling for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08555/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Attacks on Deep Models for Financial Transaction Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08361/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [FaultDiffusion: Few-Shot Fault Time Series Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15174/) (2025)
- [TimeTok: Granularity-Controllable Time-Series Generation via Hierarchical Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01418/) (2026)
- [Accelerating Reproducible Research in Synthetic EHR Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06990/) (2026)
- [Seq2Synth: Benchmarking Temporal Fidelity in Synthetic Sequential Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15606/) (2026)
- [Realism VS Accuracy: Event Sequence Forecasting from a Generative Modeling Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12586/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tabular data generation has recently attracted a growing interest due to its different application scenarios. However, generating time series of tabular data, where each element of the series depends on the others, remains a largely unexplored domain. This gap is probably due to the difficulty of jointly solving different problems, the main of which are the heterogeneity of tabular data (a problem common to non-time-dependent approaches) and the variable length of a time series. In this paper, we propose a Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) based approach for tabular data series generation. Inspired by the recent success of DiTs in image and video generation, we extend this framework to deal with heterogeneous data and variable-length sequences. Using extensive experiments on six datasets, we show that the proposed approach outperforms previous work by a large margin.
