Patched-DeltaNet: Token-Level Event-Driven Memory for Linear-Time Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Time series anomaly detection is critical for maintaining the reliability of mission-critical systems. While Transformer-based models like PatchTST have shown remarkable performance, their $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ computational complexity severely limits deployment in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we propose Patched-DeltaNet, a novel architecture combining time-series patching with Gated Delta Networks. By integrating these paradigms, we hypothesize and demonstrate the emergence of token-level event-driven memory, whereby the patching mechanism extracts local semantic chunks, while the error-driven DeltaNet updates its recurrent state exclusively when significant physical changes, defined as deltas, occur. This synergy effectively filters out background noise and captures sudden anomalous drifts. Our rigorous experiments on the Server Machine Dataset (SMD) benchmark demonstrate the structural superiority and sample efficiency of Patched-DeltaNet. By strictly outperforming recent architectures under unified evaluation constraints and identical compute budgets, our model yields an ROC-AUC of 0.957 and PA-F1 of 0.822, while drastically reducing computational complexity to the theoretical minimum of $\mathcal{O}(L/P)$.