STAR: Boosting Time Series Foundation Models for Anomaly Detection through State-aware Adapter

While Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection (MTSAD), however, in real-world industrial scenarios, many time series comprise not only numerical variables such as temperature and flow, but also numerous discrete state variables that describe the system status, such as valve on/off or day of the week. Existing TSFMs often overlook the distinct categorical nature of state variables and their critical role as conditions, typically treating them uniformly with numerical variables. This inappropriate modeling approach prevents the model from fully leveraging state information and even leads to a significant degradation in detection performance after state variables are integrated. To address this critical limitation, this paper proposes a novel STate-aware AdapteR (STAR). STAR is a plug-and-play module designed to enhance the capability of TSFMs in modeling and leveraging state variables during the fine-tuning stage. Specifically, STAR comprisesthree core components: (1) We design an Identity-guided State Encoder, whicheffectively captures the complex categorical semantics of state variables through a learnable State Memory. (2) We propose a Conditional Bottleneck Adapter, which dynamically generates low-rank adaptation parameters conditioned on the current state, thereby flexibly injecting the influence of state variables into the backbone model. (3) We also introduce a Numeral-State Matching module to more effectively detect anomalies inherent to the state variables themselves. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that STAR can improve the performance of existing TSFMs on MTSAD.