SC-JEPA: Stabilizing Latent Predictive Learning for Time-Series Anomaly Prediction

Abstract

Time-series anomaly prediction aims to forecast future system failures before they fully emerge, making latent predictive models such as JEPA a promising framework for capturing precursor dynamics. However, directly applying continuous self-distillation to time-series data is often unstable and can lead to representation collapse, while also struggling to model precursors evolving at different temporal scales. To address this, we propose \textbf{SC-JEPA}, a new JEPA-based framework to model time-series anomaly prediction in a discretized predictive state space. It introduces a soft codebook bottleneck to stabilize latent predictive learning and encourage regime-level structure in the learned representations. Building on this stabilized latent space, we further design a multi-resolution predictive objective to capture precursor patterns at different temporal scales. Experiments on five real-world benchmarks show that SC-JEPA achieves strong and consistent early-warning performance.

Accepted at the 2026 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2026)