Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate synthetic data, in which tabular data constitute a fundamental data modality across a wide range of domains. Yet, current evaluation practices often provide limited insights into whether the synthetic data preserve real data-generating relationships or introduce plausible-looking artifacts. We present a conceptually simple, interpretable auditing framework that compares the explanatory structure induced by real versus synthetic data. The key idea is to use a transparent rule-based model as a shared explanatory language: we extract rules from real data to summarize how features relate to labels, then examine how this rule structure changes when explained using LLM-generated data. Importantly, these rules are derived by an independent rule auditor rather than by the generator itself. The resulting “explanation shift” reveals which relationships are preserved, weakened, removed, or newly introduced by the generator, offering actionable diagnostics beyond aggregate fidelity scores. We further provide a theoretical perspective that links explanation shift and cross-domain predictive gaps to distribution mismatch within an interpretable hypothesis class. Overall, our approach turns synthetic data evaluation into a human-auditable comparison of explanations, improving transparency for LLM-based tabular synthesis.

The formation and circulation of ideas in philosophy have profound implications for understanding philosophical dynamism–enabling us to identify seminal texts, delineate intellectual traditions, and track changing conventions in the act of philosophizing. However, traditional analyses of these issues often depend on manual reading and subjective interpretation, constrained by human cognitive limits. We introduce InterIDEAS, a pioneering dataset designed to bridge philosophy, literary studies, and natural language processing (NLP). By merging theories of intertextuality from literary studies with bibliometric techniques and recent LLMs, InterIDEAS enables both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the intellectual, social, and historical relations embedded within authentic philosophical texts. This dataset not only assists the study of philosophy but also contributes to the development of language models by providing a training corpus that challenges and enhances their interpretative capacity.