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Efficient single instance segmentation is critical for unlocking features in on-the-fly mobile imaging applications, such as photo capture and editing. Existing mobile solutions often restrict segmentation to portraits or salient objects due to computational constraints. Recent advancements like the Segment Anything Model improve accuracy but remain computationally expensive for mobile, because it processes the entire image with heavy transformer backbones. To address this, we propose TraceNet, a one-click-driven single instance segmentation model. TraceNet segments a user-specified instance by back-tracing the receptive field of a ConvNet backbone, focusing computations on relevant regions and reducing inference cost and memory usage during mobile inference. Starting from user needs in real mobile applications, we define efficient single-instance segmentation tasks and introduce two novel metrics to evaluate both accuracy and robustness to low-quality input clicks. Extensive evaluations on the MS-COCO and LVIS datasets highlight TraceNet’s ability to generate high-quality instance masks efficiently and accurately while demonstrating robustness to imperfect user inputs. 

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.