ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

TSFMAudit: Detecting Data Contamination in Time Series Foundation Models

other · 2026-05-27

TSFMAudit, an innovative technique, identifies contamination in pretraining data for time series foundation models (TSFMs). This method assesses contamination by analyzing adaptation efficiency during the fine-tuning process; datasets that are contaminated exhibit a quicker decrease in loss with minimal movement of the backbone. This approach has been tested on 6 TSFMs and 187 datasets, utilizing verified training source evidence. TSFMAudit represents the inaugural effort to tackle the auditing of pretraining contamination specifically for TSFMs.

Key facts

  • TSFMAudit is the first method for pretraining contamination auditing in TSFMs.
  • It uses probe adaptation dynamics to detect contamination.
  • Contaminated datasets exhibit faster loss reduction and smaller backbone movement during fine-tuning.
  • Evaluated on 6 TSFMs and 187 datasets.
  • Evaluation uses documented training source evidence as supervision.
  • Time series signals are continuous and heterogeneous, complicating auditing.
  • The work addresses concerns about overly optimistic performance estimates due to contamination.
  • The method is formalized as a probe-based auditing approach.

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

Sources