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Back to Repair: A Minimal Denoising Network for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Machine Learning 2026-04-29 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We introduce JuRe (Just Repair), a minimal denoising network for time series anomaly detection that exposes a central finding: architectural complexity is unnecessary when the training objective correctly implements the manifold-projection principle. JuRe consists of a single depthwise-separable convolutional residual block with hidden dimension 128, trained to repair corrupted time series windows and scored at inference by a fixed, parameter-free structural discrepancy function. Despite using no attention, no latent variable, and no adversarial component, JuRe ranks second on the TSB-AD multivariate benchmark (AUC-PR 0.404, 180 series, 17 datasets) and second on the UCR univariate archive by AUC-PR (0.198, 250 series), leading all neural baselines on AUC-PR and VUS-PR. Component ablation on TSB-AD identifies training-time corruption as the dominant factor (Δ\DeltaAUC-PR =0.047= 0.047 on removal), confirming that the denoising objective, not network capacity, drives detection quality. Pairwise Wilcoxon signed-rank tests establish statistical significance against 21 of 25 baselines on TSB-AD. Code is available at the URL https://github.com/iis-esslingen/JuRe.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.17388,
  title  = {Back to Repair: A Minimal Denoising Network for Time Series Anomaly Detection},
  author = {Kadir-Kaan Özer and René Ebeling and Markus Enzweiler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17388},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

9 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables