# SMart: A Multi-source Multi-phase Time Series Representation Transfer Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02203 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02203/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [A Transformer-based Framework for Multivariate Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02803/) (2020)
- [InceptionTime: Finding AlexNet for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04939/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Scalable Representation Learning for Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10738/) (2019)
- [Decomposing Motion and Content for Natural Video Sequence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08033/) (2017)
- [Multi-task Self-Supervised Learning for Human Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11879/) (2019)
- [A Time Series Forest for Classification and Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1302.2277/) (2013)
- [TS-CHIEF: A Scalable and Accurate Forest Algorithm for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10329/) (2019)
- [SOM-VAE: Interpretable Discrete Representation Learning on Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02199/) (2018)
- [Transfer learning for time series classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01533/) (2018)
- [TimeNet: Pre-trained deep recurrent neural network for time series classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08838/) (2017)
- [Proximity Forest: An effective and scalable distance-based classifier for time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10594/) (2018)
- [Data augmentation using synthetic data for time series classification with deep residual networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02455/) (2018)
- [Improving Clinical Predictions through Unsupervised Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00490/) (2018)
- [Similarity Preserving Representation Learning for Time Series Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03584/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Time series representation learning (TSRL) has attracted growing research interests in recent years. Two recent explorations in TSRL are: i) exploiting a transformer-based framework to learn time series; ii) instead of using only the targeted dataset, borrowing time series from other datasets to to facilitate representation transfer. While these two explorations are shown effective, the self-supervised time series recovery task in (i) and the single-source dataset used in (ii) are technically simple and thus can be enhanced with new ideas. In this work, we propose a new TSRL framework, namely multi-source multi-phase time series representation transfer (SMart), which has two novel mechanisms to address the aforementioned deficiencies: 1) a multi-phase recurrence plots recovery task, in three alternative modes, for guiding the encoder to embed time series dynamics into the time series representation; and 2) a source dataset selector to select multiple suitable source datasets to supplement the original target dataset for pre-training the TSRL encoder. Experimental results show that SMart outperforms several state-of-the-art models for time series representation learning, classification and regression on both uni-variate and multi-variate time series datasets, reducing mean absolute error up to 19.5% for time series regression, and increasing average accuracy up to 1.34% for time series classification.