# AimTS: Augmented Series and Image Contrastive Learning for Time Series Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09993 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09993/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02186/) (2022)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02053/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [ROCKET: Exceptionally fast and accurate time series classification using random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13051/) (2019)
- [The UEA multivariate time series classification archive, 2018](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00075/) (2018)
- [Keystroke Dynamics as Part of Lifelogging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10144/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Scalable Representation Learning for Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10738/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training For Time Series via Time-Frequency Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08496/) (2022)
- [TFB: Towards Comprehensive and Fair Benchmarking of Time Series Forecasting Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20150/) (2024)
- [Time Series Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12478/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning for Time Series with Temporal Neighborhood Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00750/) (2021)
- [CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15466/) (2020)
- [TEST: Text Prototype Aligned Embedding to Activate LLM's Ability for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08241/) (2023)
- [CoST: Contrastive Learning of Disentangled Seasonal-Trend Representations for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01575/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Survey of Data Augmentation for Time Series Classification with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15951/) (2020)
- [SimMTM: A Simple Pre-Training Framework for Masked Time-Series Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00861/) (2023)
- [DUET: Dual Clustering Enhanced Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10859/) (2024)
- [Image Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08610/) (2022)
- [CATCH: Channel-Aware multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection via Frequency Patching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12261/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [K2VAE: A Koopman-Kalman Enhanced Variational AutoEncoder for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23017/) (2025)
- [STAR: Boosting Time Series Foundation Models for Anomaly Detection through State-aware Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16014/) (2025)
- [Unlocking the Value of Text: Event-Driven Reasoning and Multi-Level Alignment for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15452/) (2026)
- [Empowering Time Series Analysis with Large-Scale Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05646/) (2026)
- [Task-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22279/) (2025)
- [QiYao-I: A Manifold Based Foundation Model for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06936/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series classification (TSC) is an important task in time series analysis. Existing TSC methods mainly train on each single domain separately, suffering from a degradation in accuracy when the samples for training are insufficient in certain domains. The pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm provides a promising direction for solving this problem. However, time series from different domains are substantially divergent, which challenges the effective pre-training on multi-source data and the generalization ability of pre-trained models. To handle this issue, we introduce Augmented Series and Image Contrastive Learning for Time Series Classification (AimTS), a pre-training framework that learns generalizable representations from multi-source time series data. We propose a two-level prototype-based contrastive learning method to effectively utilize various augmentations in multi-source pre-training, which learns representations for TSC that can be generalized to different domains. In addition, considering augmentations within the single time series modality are insufficient to fully address classification problems with distribution shift, we introduce the image modality to supplement structural information and establish a series-image contrastive learning to improve the generalization of the learned representations for TSC tasks. Extensive experiments show that after multi-source pre-training, AimTS achieves good generalization performance, enabling efficient learning and even few-shot learning on various downstream TSC datasets.