Structured Latent Space Modeling over Multi-Scale Temporal Patches for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

Existing patching and multi-scale methods advance multivariate time series forecasting but treat learned representations as transient byproducts of prediction, lacking explicit mechanisms that enforce structural consistency across temporal scales. We propose M2Patch, a CNN-based architecture that organizes channel-independent observations into a structured latent space via two complementary differentiable penalties. Multi-scale patching decomposes the input into overlapping temporal granularities, depthwise separable CNN blocks with progressively growing dilation extracts scale-specific features at linear complexity, and per-scale learned projections compress these features into a compact latent representation. An intra-scale smoothness penalty enforces temporal continuity between adjacent patches, while an inter-scale alignment penalty restores cross-granularity interaction through learnable cross-scale mappings, so that all scales encode mutually consistent representations of the underlying dynamics. Extensive experiments on ten real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that M2Patch significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Further analyses establish M2Patch as a structure-aware recognizer: it recovers channel functional groupings and remains robust under patch-level input corruption, confirming that the structured latent space captures the data's intrinsic dynamics.