TEX-MEX: Similarity-Guided Temporal Contrastive Learning for Time Series

arXiv:2610.19557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contrastive learning for time series depends on deciding which pairs of inputs should be treated as similar and dissimilar. Because few augmentations reliably preserve meaning in time series, prior methods have relied on two disjoint notions of similarity between windows: structural similarity, which relates windows with similar morphology, and temporal similarity, which relates windows that occur close together in time. We introduce TEX-MEX, to our knowledge the first approach to unify the two into a single relationship. Given a random batch of windows drawn across the dataset, TEX-MEX uses the encoder to identify which windows are structurally similar or dissimilar to each other. It then pulls each window toward the temporally shifted versions of similar windows and pushes it away from those of dissimilar ones, learning what typically accompanies similar windows in time. Across PPG, EEG, ECG, accelerometry, and continuous glucose monitoring, TEX-MEX broadly achieves state-of-the-art performance against contrastive, reconstructive, JEPA-based, and modality-specific approaches, establishing it as a strong general SSL objective. We further train a 560K-parameter PPG foundation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a broad range of downstream benchmarks while being roughly 50x smaller than the next-best unimodally pretrained PPG foundation model in our evaluation. We will release this foundation model open-source and open-weight to the community to support future work and practical applications.

Abstract:Contrastive learning for time series depends on deciding which pairs of inputs should be treated as similar and dissimilar. Because few augmentations reliably preserve meaning in time series, prior methods have relied on two disjoint notions of similarity between windows: structural similarity, which relates windows with similar morphology, and temporal similarity, which relates windows that occur close together in time. We introduce TEX-MEX, to our knowledge the first approach to unify the two into a single relationship. Given a random batch of windows drawn across the dataset, TEX-MEX uses the encoder to identify which windows are structurally similar or dissimilar to each other. It then pulls each window toward the temporally shifted versions of similar windows and pushes it away from those of dissimilar ones, learning what typically accompanies similar windows in time. Across PPG, EEG, ECG, accelerometry, and continuous glucose monitoring, TEX-MEX broadly achieves state-of-the-art performance against contrastive, reconstructive, JEPA-based, and modality-specific approaches, establishing it as a strong general SSL objective. We further train a 560K-parameter PPG foundation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a broad range of downstream benchmarks while being roughly 50x smaller than the next-best unimodally pretrained PPG foundation model in our evaluation. We will release this foundation model open-source and open-weight to the community to support future work and practical applications.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.19557 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.19557v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.19557 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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TEX-MEX: Similarity-Guided Temporal Contrastive Learning for Time Series

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