TimeTok: Granularity-Controllable Time-Series Generation via Hierarchical Tokenization

Abstract

Time-series data are inherently multiscale, spanning diverse temporal granularities from coarse trends to fine-scale dynamics. However, existing time-series generative models provide limited control over the temporal granularity of both inputs and outputs, restricting their ability to condition on user-provided coarse sketches and generate samples at a desired target granularity. To address this, we introduce TimeTok, a unified framework for Granularity-Controllable Time-Series Generation (GC-TSG), which generates time series at any target granularity from any coarser input (e.g., rough sketches) or without conditioning. At the core of TimeTok is a hierarchical tokenization strategy that maps time series into an ordered sequence of tokens, from coarse to fine temporal granularity. Our autoregressive generation process operates across these granularity levels, producing token blocks that are decoded back into continuous time series. This design naturally enables GC-TSG within a single framework, where controlling the number of token blocks provides explicit control over output detail. Experiments show that TimeTok excels at GC-TSG tasks while achieving state-of-the-art performance in standard generation. Furthermore, we showcase TimeTok's potential as a foundational tokenizer by training on multiple datasets with heterogeneous temporal granularities, verifying strong transferability that consistently outperforms models trained on individual datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first unified framework that covers the full generative spectrum for time series, offering a valuable foundation for models that benefit from diverse temporal granularities.