Zhijie Zhong, Zhiwen Yu, Kaixiang Yang, Yongheng Liu, Jun Jiang, C. L. Philip Chen
原文摘要
Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) research predominantly focuses on unsupervised architectures to model normal data dynamics under label scarcity. However, practical deployments frequently archive historical operational incidents, questioning whether continuous unsupervised architectural scaling remains the most cost-effective pursuit. In this paper, we empirically quantify the trade-offs between supervisory signals and model complexity. We introduce STAND, a deliberately minimalist supervised baseline based on bidirectional recurrent encoding. Across five benchmark datasets evaluated under a strictly disjoint out-of-sample temporal protocol, minimalist supervised models achieve competitive or superior accuracy relative to complex unsupervised alternatives. Furthermore, controlled label-scaling and few-shot evaluations confirm that these supervisory advantages persist under constrained historical event budgets, while STAND exhibits higher prediction certainty and sharper event delineation than reconstruction-based baselines. These findings encourage the TSAD community to complement algorithmic complexity with data-centric label utilization when annotations are accessible. The source code, benchmark datasets, and an extended Supplementary Document are publicly available at https://emorzz1g.github.io/STAND.
Hangming Zhang, Yao Zhao, Haotian Kuang, C. L. Philip Chen, Tong Zhang, Tengyue Ma
原文摘要
B2B outbound sales involves high transaction values and relationship-based trust, so closing a deal typically requires multiple rounds of outreach building on prior context. Existing LLM-based sales agents operate within single sessions and cannot carry forward context or refine strategies from experience. Methods that do learn from experience store lessons as unstructured text and treat all outcomes as equally informative, with no mechanism to distinguish a flawed strategy from an external factor. We propose SPAR, a self-evolving framework that models selling strategies as testable hypotheses and refines them without parameter updates. A double-loop architecture lets an inner loop adapt to individual merchants through episodic memory while an outer loop evolves a shared strategy playbook through causal attribution and hypothesis-driven evolution. In a live A/B test on the 1688 platform with over 200,000 merchants, SPAR achieves +15.8% conversion lift and +35.8% high-intent merchant growth. Human evaluation by domain experts rates SPAR at 4.62 out of 5 on overall sales quality, the highest among all methods.