TY - GEN
T1 - Towards Faithful and Consistent Explanations for Graph Neural Networks
AU - Zhao, Tianxiang
AU - Luo, Dongsheng
AU - Zhang, Xiang
AU - Wang, Suhang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 ACM.
PY - 2023/2/27
Y1 - 2023/2/27
N2 - Uncovering rationales behind predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs) has received increasing attention over recent years. Instance-level GNN explanation aims to discover critical input elements, like nodes or edges, that the target GNN relies upon for making predictions. Though various algorithms are proposed, most of them formalize this task by searching the minimal subgraph which can preserve original predictions. However, an inductive bias is deep-rooted in this framework: several subgraphs can result in the same or similar outputs as the original graphs. Consequently, they have the danger of providing spurious explanations and fail to provide consistent explanations. Applying them to explain weakly-performed GNNs would further amplify these issues. To address this problem, we theoretically examine the predictions of GNNs from the causality perspective. Two typical reasons of spurious explanations are identified: confounding effect of latent variables like distribution shift, and causal factors distinct from the original input. Observing that both confounding effects and diverse causal rationales are encoded in internal representations, we propose a simple yet effective countermeasure by aligning embeddings. Concretely, concerning potential shifts in the high-dimensional space, we design a distribution-aware alignment algorithm based on anchors. This new objective is easy to compute and can be incorporated into existing techniques with no or little effort. Theoretical analysis shows that it is in effect optimizing a more faithful explanation objective in design, which further justifies the proposed approach.
AB - Uncovering rationales behind predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs) has received increasing attention over recent years. Instance-level GNN explanation aims to discover critical input elements, like nodes or edges, that the target GNN relies upon for making predictions. Though various algorithms are proposed, most of them formalize this task by searching the minimal subgraph which can preserve original predictions. However, an inductive bias is deep-rooted in this framework: several subgraphs can result in the same or similar outputs as the original graphs. Consequently, they have the danger of providing spurious explanations and fail to provide consistent explanations. Applying them to explain weakly-performed GNNs would further amplify these issues. To address this problem, we theoretically examine the predictions of GNNs from the causality perspective. Two typical reasons of spurious explanations are identified: confounding effect of latent variables like distribution shift, and causal factors distinct from the original input. Observing that both confounding effects and diverse causal rationales are encoded in internal representations, we propose a simple yet effective countermeasure by aligning embeddings. Concretely, concerning potential shifts in the high-dimensional space, we design a distribution-aware alignment algorithm based on anchors. This new objective is easy to compute and can be incorporated into existing techniques with no or little effort. Theoretical analysis shows that it is in effect optimizing a more faithful explanation objective in design, which further justifies the proposed approach.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85149673901&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85149673901&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3539597.3570421
DO - 10.1145/3539597.3570421
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85149673901
T3 - WSDM 2023 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
SP - 634
EP - 642
BT - WSDM 2023 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 16th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2023
Y2 - 27 February 2023 through 3 March 2023
ER -