TimeX++: Learning Time-Series Explanations with Information BottleneckZichuan Liu, Tianchun Wang, Jimeng Shi et al.
Explaining deep learning models operating on time series data is crucial in various applications of interest which require interpretable and transparent insights from time series signals. In this work, we investigate this problem from an information theoretic perspective and show that most existing measures of explainability may suffer from trivial solutions and distributional shift issues. To address these issues, we introduce a simple yet practical objective function for time series explainable learning. The design of the objective function builds upon the principle of information bottleneck (IB), and modifies the IB objective function to avoid trivial solutions and distributional shift issues. We further present TimeX++, a novel explanation framework that leverages a parametric network to produce explanation-embedded instances that are both in-distributed and label-preserving. We evaluate TimeX++ on both synthetic and real-world datasets comparing its performance against leading baselines, and validate its practical efficacy through case studies in a real-world environmental application. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that TimeX++ outperforms baselines across all datasets, demonstrating a substantial improvement in explanation quality for time series data. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zichuan-liu/TimeXplusplus}.
2.7CLMay 18, 2025
LM$^2$otifs : An Explainable Framework for Machine-Generated Texts DetectionXu Zheng, Zhuomin Chen, Esteban Schafir et al.
The impressive ability of large language models to generate natural text across various tasks has led to critical challenges in authorship authentication. Although numerous detection methods have been developed to differentiate between machine-generated texts (MGT) and human-generated texts (HGT), the explainability of these methods remains a significant gap. Traditional explainability techniques often fall short in capturing the complex word relationships that distinguish HGT from MGT. To address this limitation, we present LM$^2$otifs, a novel explainable framework for MGT detection. Inspired by probabilistic graphical models, we provide a theoretical rationale for the effectiveness. LM$^2$otifs utilizes eXplainable Graph Neural Networks to achieve both accurate detection and interpretability. The LM$^2$otifs pipeline operates in three key stages: first, it transforms text into graphs based on word co-occurrence to represent lexical dependencies; second, graph neural networks are used for prediction; and third, a post-hoc explainability method extracts interpretable motifs, offering multi-level explanations from individual words to sentence structures. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the comparable performance of LM$^2$otifs. The empirical evaluation of the extracted explainable motifs confirms their effectiveness in differentiating HGT and MGT. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals distinct and visible linguistic fingerprints characteristic of MGT.