Title:TriHead-GAN: A Generative Adversarial Network with Triple-Head Discriminator for Carbon Emission Time Series Generation

Abstract:Accurate carbon emission monitoring is critical for climate policy and emerging regulatory mechanisms such as the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, yet city-level high-frequency monitoring data remain extremely scarce, severely limiting data-hungry deep learning models. Time series generation is a natural remedy, but existing GAN and diffusion-based generators often provide limited explicit supervision for the domain structure of carbon emission data: they may match marginal distributional statistics while insufficiently preserving cross-variable correlations between CO$_2$ and co-emitted pollutants and meteorological factors, and tend to collapse the first-difference statistics of atmospheric measurements, producing sequences that are smooth on average but lack the realistic step-wise variability of the underlying signals. We propose TriHead-GAN, a Transformer-based adversarial framework whose triple-head discriminator jointly supervises three complementary aspects of the joint distribution: distributional authenticity via a Wasserstein critic, cross-variable dependency via leakage-free regression of the target variable, and step-wise temporal smoothness via adjacent-difference prediction. The generator combines global self-attention with local temporal convolution, per-step noise injection, and an anti-smoothing loss that matches first-difference statistics. Experiments on the self-collected Changsha Carbon dataset, two public carbon datasets (China, US), and the ETTh1 benchmark show that TriHead-GAN achieves favorable performance over mainstream baselines on the vast majority of settings, and that the resulting synthetic windows improve downstream forecasting accuracy in low-resource carbon monitoring scenarios.

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