arXiv:2602.08500cs.LG2026-02

研究异构图神经网络中元路径注意力是否真实反映重要性,发现其可靠性因数据集而异。

Is Meta-Path Attention an Explanation? Evidence of Alignment and Decoupling in Heterogeneous GNNs

  • 提出MetaXplain框架,实现对元路径视图的精准解释
  • 发现注意力与解释结果相关性高,但在不同数据集上存在解耦现象
  • 解释可降噪,重训练后模型性能反而提升,适合图分析研究者

基于元路径的异构图神经网络通过元路径诱导的视图进行聚合,其语义级注意力常被用作解释“哪些语义重要”。本文通过实证研究探讨:元路径注意力何时反映元路径重要性,何时发生解耦。核心挑战在于现有事后解释方法多针对同质图,直接应用于异构邻域会混杂语义并引入混淆扰动。为此,我们提出MetaXplain——一种元路径感知的事后解释协议,通过(i)视图分解解释,(ii)符合模式的通道级扰动,(iii)融合感知归因,在不修改底层预测器的前提下,将现有解释器应用于原生元路径视图域。我们在ACM、DBLP和IMDB数据集上,使用HAN和HAN-GCN,对比梯度、扰动和Shapley风格解释器,评估其在标准忠实度指标下的表现,同时引入元路径注意力-解释对齐度(MP-AEA),衡量注意力权重与解释所得元路径贡献分数之间的排名相关性。结果显示,元路径感知解释优于随机基线;但MP-AEA显示,其对齐程度随数据集和主干模型变化,存在显著解耦现象;此外,在解释生成的子图上重新训练模型,通常能保持甚至在某些噪声环境下提升预测性能,表明解释具有去噪效应。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Meta-path-based heterogeneous graph neural networks aggregate over meta-path-induced views, and their semantic-level attention over meta-path channels is widely used as a narrative for ``which semantics matter.'' We study this assumption empirically by asking: when does meta-path attention reflect meta-path importance, and when can it decouple? A key challenge is that most post-hoc GNN explainers are designed for homogeneous graphs, and naive adaptations to heterogeneous neighborhoods can mix semantics and confound perturbations. To enable a controlled empirical analysis, we introduce MetaXplain, a meta-path-aware post-hoc explanation protocol that applies existing explainers in the native meta-path view domain via (i) view-factorized explanations, (ii) schema-valid channel-wise perturbations, and (iii) fusion-aware attribution, without modifying the underlying predictor. We benchmark representative gradient-, perturbation-, and Shapley-style explainers on ACM, DBLP, and IMDB with HAN and HAN-GCN, comparing against xPath and type-matched random baselines under standard faithfulness metrics. To quantify attention reliability, we propose Meta-Path Attention--Explanation Alignment (MP-AEA), which measures rank correlation between learned attention weights and explanation-derived meta-path contribution scores across random runs. Our results show that meta-path-aware explanations typically outperform random controls, while MP-AEA reveals both high-alignment and statistically significant decoupling regimes depending on the dataset and backbone; moreover, retraining on explanation-induced subgraphs often preserves, and in some noisy regimes improves, predictive performance, suggesting an explanation-as-denoising effect.

图神经网络元路径模型解释注意力机制

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