# Beyond Visual Realism: Toward Reliable Financial Time Series Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12990 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12990/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [Autoregressive Denoising Diffusion Models for Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12072/) (2021)
- [Quant GANs: Deep Generation of Financial Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06673/) (2019)
- [Deep Generative Modeling for Financial Time Series with Application in VaR: A Comparative Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10370/) (2024)
- [TimeFormer: Transformer with Attention Modulation Empowered by Temporal Characteristics for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06680/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Parametric Memory Decoding for Zero-Shot Routing in LoRA-Based External Parametric Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04118/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative models for financial time series often create data that look realistic and even reproduce stylized facts such as fat tails or volatility clustering. However, these apparent successes break down under trading backtests: models like GANs or WGAN-GP frequently collapse, yielding extreme and unrealistic results that make the synthetic data unusable in practice. We identify the root cause in the neglect of financial asymmetry and rare tail events, which strongly affect market risk but are often overlooked by objectives focusing on distribution matching. To address this, we introduce the Stylized Facts Alignment GAN (SFAG), which converts key stylized facts into differentiable structural constraints and jointly optimizes them with adversarial loss. This multi-constraint design ensures that generated series remain aligned with market dynamics not only in plots but also in backtesting. Experiments on the Shanghai Composite Index (2004--2024) show that while baseline GANs produce unstable and implausible trading outcomes, SFAG generates synthetic data that preserve stylized facts and support robust momentum strategy performance. Our results highlight that structure-preserving objectives are essential to bridge the gap between superficial realism and practical usability in financial generative modeling.