CTRL-FM: Inference-Time Structural Control for Flow-Based Virtual Sensing under Long-Horizon Node Outages

Boshra Khalili, Andrew Smyth

Long-horizon node outages are harder than conventional missing-value imputation because complete sensor trajectories remain unobserved for extended periods, while the usefulness of spatial and temporal dependencies varies across outage locations and operating regimes. Existing graph, diffusion, and flow-based methods typically impose a fixed structural bias, which can oversmooth abrupt changes or propagate errors from unreliable neighbors. We introduce CTRL-FM, an observation-preserving flow-matching framework that treats structural guidance as an outage-conditioned inference-time decision. A missing-only flow-matching backbone learns a conditional velocity field while keeping observed measurements exactly fixed. For each realized outage, CTRL-FM constructs self-supervised proxy outages from surviving measurements and uses their known values to select among uncontrolled, graph-dominant, temporal-dominant, and balanced control policies. The selected policy is locally modulated by graph and temporal reliability estimated exclusively from surviving observations, while boundary-anchored trends provide structural guidance. Control is applied only to missing entries and is rejected…