MLAD: A Multi-Task Learning Framework for Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is a critical task across a range of real-world domains, such as industrial automation and the internet of things. These environments are generally monitored by various types of sensors that produce complex, high-dimensional time-series data with intricate cross-sensor dependencies. While existing methods often utilize sequence modeling or graph neural networks to capture global sensor relationships, they typically treat all sensors uniformly—potentially overlooking the benefit of grouping sensors with similar temporal patterns. To this end, we propose a novel framework called Multi-task Learning Anomaly Detection (MLAD), which leverages clustering techniques to group sensors based on their temporal characteristics, and employs a multi-task learning paradigm to jointly capture both shared patterns across all sensors and specialized patterns within each cluster. MLAD consists of four key modules: (1) sensor clustering based on sensors’ time series, (2) representation learning with a cluster-constrained graph neural network, (3) multi-task forecasting with shared and cluster-specific learning layers, and (4) anomaly scoring. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that MLAD achieves superior detection performance over state-of-the-art baselines. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the modules of our MLAD. This study highlights the value of incorporating sensor heterogeneity into model design, which contributes to more accurate and robust anomaly detection in sensor-based monitoring systems.