LEFT: Learnable Fusion of Tri-view Tokens for Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Detection

TL;DR

LEFT introduces a unified unsupervised time series anomaly detection framework that models anomalies as inconsistencies across multiple views, leveraging learnable multi-scale, time, and frequency features with a novel cycle consistency constraint.

Contribution

The paper proposes LEFT, a novel framework that enforces analysis-synthesis consistency across tri-view tokens for improved anomaly detection in time series.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on benchmarks.

Reduces FLOPs by 5x and speeds up training by 8x.

Effectively models subtle anomalies through multi-view consistency.

Abstract

As a fundamental data mining task, unsupervised time series anomaly detection (TSAD) aims to build a model for identifying abnormal timestamps without assuming the availability of annotations. A key challenge in unsupervised TSAD is that many anomalies are too subtle to exhibit detectable deviation in any single view (e.g., time domain), and instead manifest as inconsistencies across multiple views like time, frequency, and a mixture of resolutions. However, most cross-view methods rely on feature or score fusion and do not enforce analysis-synthesis consistency, meaning the frequency branch is not required to reconstruct the time signal through an inverse transform, and vice versa. In this paper, we present Learnable Fusion of Tri-view Tokens (LEFT), a unified unsupervised TSAD framework that models anomalies as inconsistencies across complementary representations. LEFT learns feature tokens from three views of the same input time series: frequency-domain tokens that embed periodicity information, time-domain tokens that capture local dynamics, and multi-scale tokens that learns abnormal patterns at varying time series granularities. By learning a set of adaptive Nyquist-constrained spectral filters, the original time series is rescaled into multiple resolutions and then encoded, allowing these multi-scale tokens to complement the extracted frequency- and time-domain information. When generating the fused representation, we introduce a novel objective that reconstructs fine-grained targets from coarser multi-scale structure, and put forward an innovative time-frequency cycle consistency constraint to explicitly regularize cross-view agreement. Experiments on real-world benchmarks show that LEFT yields the best detection accuracy against SOTA baselines, while achieving a 5x reduction on FLOPs and 8x speed-up for training.