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原文摘要

Time series imputation is a crucial area for reliable time series analysis, yet it remains challenging due to the complex temporal dynamics and noise of real-world data. Existing approaches, however, exhibit two limitations: missing and observed values are embedded within the same representation space without explicit structural separation, and continuous diffusion-based methods recover the missing values only through many iterative denoising steps rather than by predicting them directly. To address these, we propose the Masked Diffusion Time-series Imputation Model (MDTIM), which leverages the training paradigm of masked diffusion model for imputation tasks. The [MASK] token is structurally orthogonal to valid observations, and because the corrupted state is the partially observed series itself, the model is trained to predict the missing values directly from the observed ones, naturally aligning both the representation and the learning objective with the imputation task. To bridge the gap between discrete masked diffusion and the continuous, ordinal nature of time series, we further introduce Stochastic Discretization, which maps continuous values to ordinal-aware tokens while preserving continuous dynamics. Our experiments on diverse benchmarks confirm that MDTIM achieves superior robustness and scalability, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art deterministic and generative baselines across various missing scenarios. Code and project page are available at https://dongbeank.github.io/MDTIM/.