Graph neural networks (GNNs) find applications in various domains such as computational biology, natural language processing, and computer security. Owing to their popularity, there is an increasing need to explain GNN predictions since GNNs are black-box machine learning models. One way to address this is counterfactual reasoning where the objective is to change the GNN prediction by minimal changes in the input graph. Existing methods for counterfactual explanation of GNNs are limited to instance-specific local reasoning. This approach has two major limitations of not being able to offer global recourse policies and overloading human cognitive ability with too much information. In this work, we study the global explainability of GNNs through global counterfactual reasoning. Specifically, we want to find a small set of representative counterfactual graphs that explains all input graphs. Towards this goal, we propose GCFExplainer, a novel algorithm powered by vertex-reinforced random walks on an edit map of graphs with a greedy summary. Extensive experiments on real graph datasets show that the global explanation from GCFExplainer provides important high-level insights of the model behavior and achieves a 46.9% gain in recourse coverage and a 9.5% reduction in recourse cost compared to the state-of-the-art local counterfactual explainers.

在高措施应用中大量部署图神经网络（GNNS）对对噪声的强大解释产生了强烈的需求，这些解释与人类的直觉很好。大多数现有方法通过识别与预测有很强相关性的输入图的子图来生成解释。这些解释对噪声并不强大，因为独立优化单个输入的相关性很容易过分拟合噪声。此外，它们与人类直觉并不十分吻合，因为从输入图中删除已识别的子图并不一定会改变预测结果。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，可以通过在类似的输入图上明确建模GNNS的共同决策逻辑来生成对GNN的强大反事实解释。我们的解释自然对噪声是强大的，因为它们是由控制许多类似输入图的GNN的共同决策边界产生的。该解释也与人类的直觉很好地吻合，因为从输入图中的解释中删除了一组边缘，从而显着改变了预测。许多公共数据集上的详尽实验证明了我们方法的出色性能。

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a powerful tool for machine learning on graphs. GNNs combine node feature information with the graph structure by recursively passing neural messages along edges of the input graph. However, incorporating both graph structure and feature information leads to complex models and explaining predictions made by GNNs remains unsolved. Here we propose GNNEXPLAINER, the first general, model-agnostic approach for providing interpretable explanations for predictions of any GNN-based model on any graph-based machine learning task. Given an instance, GNNEXPLAINER identifies a compact subgraph structure and a small subset of node features that have a crucial role in GNN's prediction. Further, GNNEXPLAINER can generate consistent and concise explanations for an entire class of instances. We formulate GNNEXPLAINER as an optimization task that maximizes the mutual information between a GNN's prediction and distribution of possible subgraph structures. Experiments on synthetic and real-world graphs show that our approach can identify important graph structures as well as node features, and outperforms alternative baseline approaches by up to 43.0% in explanation accuracy. GNNEXPLAINER provides a variety of benefits, from the ability to visualize semantically relevant structures to interpretability, to giving insights into errors of faulty GNNs.

深度学习方法正在实现许多人工智能任务上的不断增长。深层模型的一个主要局限性是它们不适合可解释性。可以通过开发事后技术来解释预测，从而产生解释性领域，从而规避这种限制。最近，关于图像和文本的深层模型的解释性取得了重大进展。在图数据的领域，图形神经网络（GNN）及其解释性正在迅速发展。但是，既没有对GNN解释性方法的统一处理，也没有标准的基准和测试床。在这项调查中，我们提供了当前GNN解释性方法的统一和分类观点。我们对这一主题的统一和分类治疗对现有方法的共同性和差异阐明了灯光，并为进一步的方法论发展奠定了基础。为了促进评估，我们生成了一组专门用于GNN解释性的基准图数据集。我们总结了当前的数据集和指标，以评估GNN的解释性。总的来说，这项工作提供了GNN解释性和评估标准化测试床的统一方法论。

子图相似度搜索是图形分析中的基本操作员。在此框架中，给定查询图和图形数据库，目标是识别结构图的数据库图的子图，这些图是与查询相似的。子图编辑距离（SED）是子图相似度最有表现力的措施之一。在这项工作中，我们研究了从训练的图形对和他们的SED值训练SED的问题。为此，我们设计了一种名为Neurosed的新型暹罗图形神经网络，其学习嵌入空间，具有丰富的结构，让人想起SED。借助专门制作的归纳偏差，不仅可以实现高精度，而且确保预测的SED，如真正的SED，满足三角不等式。设计足够通用，也可以模拟图表编辑距离（GED），同时确保预测的GED空间是指标，如真正的GED空间。对于SED和GED的真实图数据集进行了广泛的实验，建立了神经传播的RMSE比现有技术的约2倍，并且比最快的基线快约18倍。此外，由于其对独立的嵌入和理论性质，神经翻转允许大约3个峰值检索图形和子图。

图形神经网络（GNN）在各种高桩预测任务中实现了最先进的性能，但是具有不规则结构的图表上的多层聚合使得GNN成为一种更不可解释的模型。先前的方法使用更简单的子图来模拟完整模型，或识别预测原因的完整模型或反事实。这两个方法旨在瞄准两个不同的目标，“模拟性”和“反事实相关”，但目前尚不清楚目标如何共同影响人类理解解释。我们设计用户学习，以调查这些关节效果，并使用该研究结果设计多目标优化（MOO）算法，以查找帕累托最佳解释，可在模拟性和反事实方面得到良好平衡。由于目标模型可以是任何GNN变体，并且由于隐私问题可能无法访问，因此我们使用零顺序信息设计一个搜索算法而不访问目标模型的架构和参数。来自四个应用的九个图表的定量实验表明，帕累托有效的解释主导使用一阶连续优化或离散组合搜索的单目标基线。在鲁棒性和敏感性中进一步评估了解释，以表明他们揭示令人信服的令人信服的能力，同时对可能的混乱持谨慎态度。各种主导的反事件可以证明算法追索权的可行性，这可能促进人类参与使用GNN决策的算法公平性。

在过去十年中，图形内核引起了很多关注，并在结构化数据上发展成为一种快速发展的学习分支。在过去的20年中，该领域发生的相当大的研究活动导致开发数十个图形内核，每个图形内核都对焦于图形的特定结构性质。图形内核已成功地成功地在广泛的域中，从社交网络到生物信息学。本调查的目标是提供图形内核的文献的统一视图。特别是，我们概述了各种图形内核。此外，我们对公共数据集的几个内核进行了实验评估，并提供了比较研究。最后，我们讨论图形内核的关键应用，并概述了一些仍有待解决的挑战。

在处理表格数据时，基于回归和决策树的模型是一个流行的选择，因为与其他模型类别相比，它们在此类任务上提供了高精度及其易于应用。但是，在图形结构数据方面，当前的树学习算法不提供管理数据结构的工具，而不是依靠功能工程。在这项工作中，我们解决了上述差距，并引入了图形树（GTA），这是一个新的基于树的学习算法，旨在在图形上操作。 GTA既利用图形结构又利用了顶点的特征，并采用了一种注意机制，该机制允许决策专注于图形的子结构。我们分析了GTA模型，并表明它们比平原决策树更具表现力。我们还在多个图和节点预测基准上证明了GTA的好处。在这些实验中，GTA始终优于其他基于树的模型，并且通常优于其他类型的图形学习算法，例如图形神经网络（GNNS）和图核。最后，我们还为GTA提供了一种解释性机制，并证明它可以提供直观的解释。

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.

Steiner树问题（STP）在图中旨在在连接给定的顶点集的图表中找到一个最小权重的树。它是一种经典的NP - 硬组合优化问题，具有许多现实世界应用（例如，VLSI芯片设计，运输网络规划和无线传感器网络）。为STP开发了许多精确和近似算法，但它们分别遭受高计算复杂性和弱案例解决方案保证。还开发了启发式算法。但是，它们中的每一个都需要应用域知识来设计，并且仅适用于特定方案。最近报道的观察结果，同一NP-COLLECLIAL问题的情况可能保持相同或相似的组合结构，但主要在其数据中不同，我们调查将机器学习技术应用于STP的可行性和益处。为此，我们基于新型图形神经网络和深增强学习设计了一种新型模型瓦坎。 Vulcan的核心是一种新颖的紧凑型图形嵌入，将高瞻度图形结构数据（即路径改变信息）转换为低维矢量表示。鉴于STP实例，Vulcan使用此嵌入来对其路径相关的信息进行编码，并基于双层Q网络（DDQN）将编码的图形发送到深度加强学习组件，以找到解决方案。除了STP之外，Vulcan还可以通过将解决方案（例如，SAT，MVC和X3C）来减少到STP来找到解决方案。我们使用现实世界和合成数据集进行广泛的实验，展示了vulcan的原型，并展示了它的功效和效率。

图形神经网络（GNN）已成为编码图形结构数据的强大工具。由于其广泛的应用程序，越来越需要开发工具来解释GNN如何做出给定的图形结构数据决定。现有的基于学习的GNN解释方法在培训中是特定于任务的，因此遭受了关键的缺点。具体而言，它们无法为使用单个解释器提供多任务预测模型的解释。在GNN以自我监督的方式训练的情况下，他们也无法提供解释，并且在未来的下游任务中使用了结果表示。为了解决这些局限性，我们提出了一个任务不合时宜的GNN解释器（TAGE），该解释器（Tage）独立于下游模型，并在自学人员的情况下接受了训练，而对下游任务不了解。 Tage可以通过看不见的下游任务来解释GNN嵌入模型，并可以有效解释多任务模型。我们的广泛实验表明，通过使用相同的模型来解释多个下游任务的预测，同时实现了与当前最新的GNN解释方法一样好甚至更好的解释质量，可以显着提高解释效率。我们的代码可公开作为DIG库的一部分，网址为https://github.com/divelab/dig/tree/main/main/dig/xgraph/tage/。

尽管近期图形神经网络（GNN）进展，但解释了GNN的预测仍然具有挑战性。现有的解释方法主要专注于后性后解释，其中采用另一种解释模型提供培训的GNN的解释。后HOC方法未能揭示GNN的原始推理过程的事实引发了建立GNN与内置解释性的需求。在这项工作中，我们提出了原型图形神经网络（Protgnn），其将原型学习与GNNS相结合，并提供了对GNN的解释的新视角。在Protgnn中，解释自然地从基于案例的推理过程衍生，并且实际在分类期间使用。通过将输入与潜伏空间中的一些学习原型的输入进行比较来获得ProtGnn的预测。此外，为了更好地解释性和更高的效率，结合了一种新颖的条件子图采样模块，以指示输入图的哪个部分与ProtGnn +中的每个原型最相似。最后，我们在各种数据集中评估我们的方法并进行具体的案例研究。广泛的结果表明，Protgnn和Protgnn +可以提供固有的解释性，同时实现与非可解释对方的准确性有关的准确性。

Counterfactual explanations promote explainability in machine learning models by answering the question "how should an input instance be perturbed to obtain a desired predicted label?". The comparison of this instance before and after perturbation can enhance human interpretation. Most existing studies on counterfactual explanations are limited in tabular data or image data. In this work, we study the problem of counterfactual explanation generation on graphs. A few studies have explored counterfactual explanations on graphs, but many challenges of this problem are still not well-addressed: 1) optimizing in the discrete and disorganized space of graphs; 2) generalizing on unseen graphs; and 3) maintaining the causality in the generated counterfactuals without prior knowledge of the causal model. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework CLEAR which aims to generate counterfactual explanations on graphs for graph-level prediction models. Specifically, CLEAR leverages a graph variational autoencoder based mechanism to facilitate its optimization and generalization, and promotes causality by leveraging an auxiliary variable to better identify the underlying causal model. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world graphs validate the superiority of CLEAR over the state-of-the-art methods in different aspects.

由于算法预测对人类的影响增加，模型解释性已成为机器学习（ML）的重要问题。解释不仅可以帮助用户了解为什么ML模型做出某些预测，还可以帮助用户了解这些预测如何更改。在本论文中，我们研究了从三个有利位置的ML模型的解释性：算法，用户和教学法，并为解释性问题贡献了一些新颖的解决方案。

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have received remarkable success in link prediction (GNNLP) tasks. Existing efforts first predefine the subgraph for the whole dataset and then apply GNNs to encode edge representations by leveraging the neighborhood structure induced by the fixed subgraph. The prominence of GNNLP methods significantly relies on the adhoc subgraph. Since node connectivity in real-world graphs is complex, one shared subgraph is limited for all edges. Thus, the choices of subgraphs should be personalized to different edges. However, performing personalized subgraph selection is nontrivial since the potential selection space grows exponentially to the scale of edges. Besides, the inference edges are not available during training in link prediction scenarios, so the selection process needs to be inductive. To bridge the gap, we introduce a Personalized Subgraph Selector (PS2) as a plug-and-play framework to automatically, personally, and inductively identify optimal subgraphs for different edges when performing GNNLP. PS2 is instantiated as a bi-level optimization problem that can be efficiently solved differently. Coupling GNNLP models with PS2, we suggest a brand-new angle towards GNNLP training: by first identifying the optimal subgraphs for edges; and then focusing on training the inference model by using the sampled subgraphs. Comprehensive experiments endorse the effectiveness of our proposed method across various GNNLP backbones (GCN, GraphSage, NGCF, LightGCN, and SEAL) and diverse benchmarks (Planetoid, OGB, and Recommendation datasets). Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/qiaoyu-tan/PS2}

我们研究了图神经网络（GNN）的解释性，作为阐明其工作机制的一步。尽管大多数当前方法都集中在解释图节点，边缘或功能上，但我们认为，作为GNNS的固有功能机制，消息流对执行解释性更为自然。为此，我们在这里提出了一种新颖的方法，即FlowX，以通过识别重要的消息流来解释GNN。为了量化流量的重要性，我们建议遵循合作游戏理论中沙普利价值观的哲学。为了解决计算所有联盟边际贡献的复杂性，我们提出了一个近似方案，以计算类似沙普利的值，作为进一步再分配训练的初步评估。然后，我们提出一种学习算法来训练流量评分并提高解释性。关于合成和现实世界数据集的实验研究表明，我们提出的FlowX导致GNN的解释性提高。

图形内核是历史上最广泛使用的图形分类任务的技术。然而，由于图的手工制作的组合特征，这些方法具有有限的性能。近年来，由于其性能卓越，图形神经网络（GNNS）已成为与下游图形相关任务的最先进的方法。大多数GNN基于消息传递神经网络（MPNN）框架。然而，最近的研究表明，MPNN不能超过Weisfeiler-Lehman（WL）算法在图形同构术中的力量。为了解决现有图形内核和GNN方法的限制，在本文中，我们提出了一种新的GNN框架，称为\ Texit {内核图形神经网络}（Kernnns），该框架将图形内核集成到GNN的消息传递过程中。通过卷积神经网络（CNNS）中的卷积滤波器的启发，KERGNNS采用可训练的隐藏图作为绘图过滤器，该绘图过滤器与子图组合以使用图形内核更新节点嵌入式。此外，我们表明MPNN可以被视为Kergnns的特殊情况。我们将Kergnns应用于多个与图形相关的任务，并使用交叉验证来与基准进行公平比较。我们表明，与现有的现有方法相比，我们的方法达到了竞争性能，证明了增加GNN的表现能力的可能性。我们还表明，KERGNNS中的训练有素的图形过滤器可以揭示数据集的本地图形结构，与传统GNN模型相比，显着提高了模型解释性。

With the rapid deployment of graph neural networks (GNNs) based techniques into a wide range of applications such as link prediction, node classification, and graph classification the explainability of GNNs has become an indispensable component for predictive and trustworthy decision-making. Thus, it is critical to explain why graph neural network (GNN) makes particular predictions for them to be believed in many applications. Some GNNs explainers have been proposed recently. However, they lack to generate accurate and real explanations. To mitigate these limitations, we propose GANExplainer, based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture. GANExplainer is composed of a generator to create explanations and a discriminator to assist with the Generator development. We investigate the explanation accuracy of our models by comparing the performance of GANExplainer with other state-of-the-art methods. Our empirical results on synthetic datasets indicate that GANExplainer improves explanation accuracy by up to 35\% compared to its alternatives.

Explaining machine learning models is an important and increasingly popular area of research interest. The Shapley value from game theory has been proposed as a prime approach to compute feature importance towards model predictions on images, text, tabular data, and recently graph neural networks (GNNs) on graphs. In this work, we revisit the appropriateness of the Shapley value for GNN explanation, where the task is to identify the most important subgraph and constituent nodes for GNN predictions. We claim that the Shapley value is a non-ideal choice for graph data because it is by definition not structure-aware. We propose a Graph Structure-aware eXplanation (GStarX) method to leverage the critical graph structure information to improve the explanation. Specifically, we define a scoring function based on a new structure-aware value from the cooperative game theory proposed by Hamiache and Navarro (HN). When used to score node importance, the HN value utilizes graph structures to attribute cooperation surplus between neighbor nodes, resembling message passing in GNNs, so that node importance scores reflect not only the node feature importance, but also the node structural roles. We demonstrate that GStarX produces qualitatively more intuitive explanations, and quantitatively improves explanation fidelity over strong baselines on chemical graph property prediction and text graph sentiment classification.

近年来，基于Weisfeiler-Leman算法的算法和神经架构，是一个众所周知的Graph同构问题的启发式问题，它成为具有图形和关系数据的机器学习的强大工具。在这里，我们全面概述了机器学习设置中的算法的使用，专注于监督的制度。我们讨论了理论背景，展示了如何将其用于监督的图形和节点表示学习，讨论最近的扩展，并概述算法的连接（置换 - ）方面的神经结构。此外，我们概述了当前的应用和未来方向，以刺激进一步的研究。