# Saliency Map-Guided Knowledge Discovery for Subclass Identification with LLM-Based Symbolic Approximations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07126/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Deep learning for time series classification: a review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04356/) (2018)
- [The UCR Time Series Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07758/) (2018)
- [ChatTS: Aligning Time Series with LLMs via Synthetic Data for Enhanced Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03104/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models on Time Series Feature Understanding: A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16563/) (2024)
- [XCM: An Explainable Convolutional Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04796/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel neuro-symbolic approach for sensor signal-based knowledge discovery, focusing on identifying latent subclasses in time series classification tasks. The approach leverages gradient-based saliency maps derived from trained neural networks to guide the discovery process. Multiclass time series classification problems are transformed into binary classification problems through label subsumption, and classifiers are trained for each of these to yield saliency maps. The input signals, grouped by predicted class, are clustered under three distinct configurations. The centroids of the final set of clusters are provided as input to an LLM for symbolic approximation and fuzzy knowledge graph matching to discover the underlying subclasses of the original multiclass problem. Experimental results on well-established time series classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our saliency map-driven method for knowledge discovery, outperforming signal-only baselines in both clustering and subclass identification.