Papers › Cross-Domain Pre-training with Language Models for Transferable Time Series Representations

Cross-Domain Pre-training with Language Models for Transferable Time Series Representations

19 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.12372archive 2025-07-28

Mingyue Cheng, Xiaoyu Tao, Qi Liu, Hao Zhang, Yiheng Chen, Defu Lian

Advancements in self-supervised pre-training (SSL) have significantly advanced the field of learning transferable time series representations, which can be very useful in enhancing the downstream task. Despite being effective, most existing works struggle to achieve cross-domain SSL pre-training, missing valuable opportunities to integrate patterns and features from different domains. The main challenge lies in the significant differences in the characteristics of time-series data across different domains, such as variations in the number of channels and temporal resolution scales. To address this challenge, we propose CrossTimeNet, a novel cross-domain SSL learning framework to learn transferable knowledge from various domains to largely benefit the target downstream task. One of the key characteristics of CrossTimeNet is the newly designed time series tokenization module, which could effectively convert the raw time series into a sequence of discrete tokens based on a reconstruction optimization process. Besides, we highlight that predicting a high proportion of corrupted tokens can be very helpful for extracting informative patterns across different domains during SSL pre-training, which has been largely overlooked in past years. Furthermore, unlike previous works, our work treats the pre-training language model (PLM) as the initialization of the encoder network, investigating the feasibility of transferring the knowledge learned by the PLM to the time series area. Through these efforts, the path to cross-domain pre-training of a generic time series model can be effectively paved. We conduct extensive experiments in a real-world scenario across various time series classification domains. The experimental results clearly confirm CrossTimeNet's superior performance.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

mingyue-cheng/crosstimenet officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
mingyue-cheng/convtimenet mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
mingyue-cheng/formertime mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
mingyue-cheng/timemae mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Language ModellingTime SeriesTime Series Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections