Self-Interpretable Graph Learning with Sufficient and Necessary Explanations
Abstract
Self-interpretable graph learning methods provide insights to unveil the black-box nature of GNNs by providing predictions with built-in explanations. However, current works suffer from performance degradation compared to GNNs trained without built-in explanations. We argue the main reason is that they fail to generate explanations satisfying both sufficiency and necessity, and the biased explanations further hurt GNNs' performance. In this work, we propose a novel framework for generating SUfficient aNd NecessarY explanations (SUNNY-GNN for short) that benefit GNNs' predictions. The key idea is to conduct augmentations by structurally perturbing given explanations and employ a contrastive loss to guide the learning of explanations toward sufficiency and necessity directions. SUNNY-GNN introduces two coefficients to generate hard and reliable contrastive samples. We further extend SUNNY-GNN to heterogeneous graphs. Empirical results on various GNNs and real-world graphs show that SUNNY-GNN yields accurate predictions and faithful explanations, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by improving 3.5% prediction accuracy and 13.1% explainability fidelity on average. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SJTU-Quant/SUNNY-GNN.
BibTeX
@article{Deng_Shen_2024, title={Self-Interpretable Graph Learning with Sufficient and Necessary Explanations}, volume={38}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/29059}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v38i10.29059}, abstractNote={Self-interpretable graph learning methods provide insights to unveil the black-box nature of GNNs by providing predictions with built-in explanations. However, current works suffer from performance degradation compared to GNNs trained without built-in explanations. We argue the main reason is that they fail to generate explanations satisfying both sufficiency and necessity, and the biased explanations further hurt GNNs’ performance. In this work, we propose a novel framework for generating SUfficient aNd NecessarY explanations (SUNNY-GNN for short) that benefit GNNs’ predictions. The key idea is to conduct augmentations by structurally perturbing given explanations and employ a contrastive loss to guide the learning of explanations toward sufficiency and necessity directions. SUNNY-GNN introduces two coefficients to generate hard and reliable contrastive samples. We further extend SUNNY-GNN to heterogeneous graphs. Empirical results on various GNNs and real-world graphs show that SUNNY-GNN yields accurate predictions and faithful explanations, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by improving 3.5% prediction accuracy and 13.1% explainability fidelity on average. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SJTU-Quant/SUNNY-GNN.}, number={10}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Deng, Jiale and Shen, Yanyan}, year={2024}, month={Mar.}, pages={11749-11756} }