LEARN-TS: LLM-Enhanced Alignment and Reconstruction with Normality Guidance for Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Reconstruction errors in multivariate time-series anomaly detection may not reliably distinguish abnormal behavior from benign deviations. Language-derived semantics offer complementary context, but existing multimodal approaches may rely on time-associated paired textual information that is difficult to obtain consistently and is not provided by standard multivariate time-series anomaly detection benchmarks. This setting poses two challenges: (1) conditioning masked reconstruction on window-specific semantics without exposing exact numerical targets or anomaly-specific cues, and (2) using a window-independent concept of normality as a complementary semantic reference rather than an independent anomaly detector. We propose LLM-Enhanced Alignment and Reconstruction with Normality Guidance for Time Series (LEARN-TS), which uses a frozen language model to construct two role-separated semantic representations without requiring temporally paired external text. Window-specific observation semantics encode temporal and cross-variable context without exact numerical values to guide channel-shared patch-masked reconstruction. A fixed, dataset-agnostic normality prompt provides a window-independent semantic reference for aligning normal representations and estimating normality discrepancy. At inference, masking each temporal patch once yields timestamp-level reconstruction evidence, conditionally modulated by discrepancy from a separate unmasked view. Across four benchmarks, LEARN-TS achieves the highest mean performance in 13 of 16 dataset-metric comparisons. Controlled ablations examine observation conditioning, joint normality alignment and scoring, and reference content, showing dataset-dependent ranking benefits and modest average gains from semantic over random references.