Towards Robust Time Series Learning via Capacity-Centric Modulation

Siru Zhong, Senzhang Wang, James T. Kwok, Yuxuan Liang

Sample-level reliability heterogeneity is common in deep time series learning. Standard training pipelines apply a uniform regularization setting to all samples, which can under-regularize corrupted samples and over-restrict clean samples. Common robustness approaches filter observations in data space or impose priors on latent representations. We propose Capacity-Centric Modulation (CCM) as a complementary, sample-adaptive regularization principle. Under this principle, we introduce SACM (Sample-Adaptive Capacity Modulation), a task-agnostic framework that exploits spectral sparsity to assign sample-wise dropout probabilities along internal activation paths. SACM integrates into existing backbones without architectural redesign and preserves the deterministic inference pipeline. Across 301 real-world dataset-backbone pairs covering 9 forecasting, 32 classification, and 4 anomaly-detection datasets, SACM reduces forecasting MSE by 6.7% on average and improves classification accuracy and point-adjusted F1 by 3.04% and 17.05%, respectively, relative to unmodified backbones, with zero test-time overhead.