X-EviProbe: Post-hoc Parameter-free Evidential Uncertainty Quantification for Frozen Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

Reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is crucial for deploying graph neural networks (GNNs) in safety-critical settings, yet dominant solutions either rely on costly multi-pass sampling or require retraining—often using *black-box auxiliary* models—to obtain evidential semantics. We propose **X-EviProbe**, a simple and parameter-free *post-hoc* framework that turns a *frozen* GNN into an evidential predictor with a decomposable view of epistemic vs. aleatoric uncertainty. X-EviProbe constructs class-wise Dirichlet evidence by probing the frozen latent space and the model’s native outputs, and incorporates graph structure via lightweight evidence-strength propagation. This yields a transparent evidential representation without retraining or additional neural components. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks show that X-EviProbe consistently ranks among the top methods for both OOD detection and misclassification detection, improving AUROC by up to **33.4%** and **8.7%** over the strongest baselines.