English

Unconditional flow-based time series generation with equivariance-regularised latent spaces

Machine Learning 2026-02-02 v1

Abstract

Flow-based models have proven successful for time-series generation, particularly when defined in lower-dimensional latent spaces that enable efficient sampling. However, how to design latent representations with desirable equivariance properties for time-series generative modelling remains underexplored. In this work, we propose a latent flow-matching framework in which equivariance is explicitly encouraged through a simple regularisation of a pre-trained autoencoder. Specifically, we introduce an equivariance loss that enforces consistency between transformed signals and their reconstructions, and use it to fine-tune latent spaces with respect to basic time-series transformations such as translation and amplitude scaling. We show that these equivariance-regularised latent spaces improve generation quality while preserving the computational advantages of latent flow models. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing diffusion-based baselines in standard time-series generation metrics, while achieving orders-of-magnitude faster sampling. These results highlight the practical benefits of incorporating geometric inductive biases into latent generative models for time series.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.22848,
  title  = {Unconditional flow-based time series generation with equivariance-regularised latent spaces},
  author = {Camilo Carvajal Reyes and Felipe Tobar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.22848},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ICASSP 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:27:35.256Z