# Temporal Saliency Detection Towards Explainable Transformer-based Timeseries Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07771 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07771/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [DeepAR: Probabilistic Forecasting with Autoregressive Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04110/) (2017)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [A Probabilistic U-Net for Segmentation of Ambiguous Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05034/) (2018)
- [Financial Time Series Forecasting with Deep Learning : A Systematic Literature Review: 2005-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13288/) (2019)
- [A Dual-Stage Attention-Based Recurrent Neural Network for Time Series Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02971/) (2017)
- [A Multi-Horizon Quantile Recurrent Forecaster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11053/) (2017)
- [UCTransNet: Rethinking the Skip Connections in U-Net from a Channel-wise Perspective with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04335/) (2021)
- [MultiResUNet : Rethinking the U-Net Architecture for Multimodal Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04049/) (2019)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks for Time Series Forecasting: Current Status and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00590/) (2019)
- [U-Net and its variants for medical image segmentation: theory and applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01118/) (2020)
- [N-HiTS: Neural Hierarchical Interpolation for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12886/) (2022)
- [Temporal Pattern Attention for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04206/) (2018)
- [Attend and Diagnose: Clinical Time Series Analysis using Attention Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03905/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Deep Learning Interpretability in Time Series Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13924/) (2020)
- [U-Time: A Fully Convolutional Network for Time Series Segmentation Applied to Sleep Staging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11162/) (2019)
- [Motion Guided Attention for Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07061/) (2019)
- [Domain Adaptation for Time Series Forecasting via Attention Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06828/) (2021)
- [Improving Deep Learning Interpretability by Saliency Guided Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14338/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ms-Mamba: Multi-scale Mamba for Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07654/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the notable advancements in numerous Transformer-based models, the task of long multi-horizon time series forecasting remains a persistent challenge, especially towards explainability. Focusing on commonly used saliency maps in explaining DNN in general, our quest is to build attention-based architecture that can automatically encode saliency-related temporal patterns by establishing connections with appropriate attention heads. Hence, this paper introduces Temporal Saliency Detection (TSD), an effective approach that builds upon the attention mechanism and applies it to multi-horizon time series prediction. While our proposed architecture adheres to the general encoder-decoder structure, it undergoes a significant renovation in the encoder component, wherein we incorporate a series of information contracting and expanding blocks inspired by the U-Net style architecture. The TSD approach facilitates the multiresolution analysis of saliency patterns by condensing multi-heads, thereby progressively enhancing the forecasting of complex time series data. Empirical evaluations illustrate the superiority of our proposed approach compared to other models across multiple standard benchmark datasets in diverse far-horizon forecasting settings. The initial TSD achieves substantial relative improvements of 31% and 46% over several models in the context of multivariate and univariate prediction. We believe the comprehensive investigations presented in this study will offer valuable insights and benefits to future research endeavors.