通过因果干预提升图神经网络的泛化能力,减少噪声干扰。
Causal Neighbourhood Learning for Invariant Graph Representations
- 基于可学习掩码和注意力机制生成反事实邻域,识别真实因果连接。
- 在四个数据集上显著优于现有GNN模型,尤其在分布迁移下表现更优。
- 适合需要鲁棒图表示的学习任务,如跨领域节点分类。
图数据常包含噪声和虚假相关性,掩盖了真实的因果关系,而这些关系对基于底层因果结构进行预测至关重要。传统图神经网络依赖虚假连接,难以在不同图间有效泛化;且聚合方式易放大虚假模式,限制模型在分布偏移下的鲁棒性。为此,我们提出因果邻域学习框架CNL-GNN,通过图结构上的因果干预,识别并保留因果相关的连接,减少虚假影响。该方法利用可学习重要性掩码与注意力机制,生成反事实邻域,并进行自适应边扰动。结合结构级干预与因果特征与混杂因素的解耦,模型学习到对不同图结构具有不变性的节点表示。实验在四个公开数据集(含一个数据集的多个领域变体)上验证,结果表明CNL-GNN在因果图学习中超越传统特征方法,显著提升分类性能,优于当前最优GNN模型。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Graph data often contain noisy and spurious correlations that mask the true causal relationships, which are essential for enabling graph models to make predictions based on the underlying causal structure of the data. Dependence on spurious connections makes it challenging for traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to generalize effectively across different graphs. Furthermore, traditional aggregation methods tend to amplify these spurious patterns, limiting model robustness under distribution shifts. To address these issues, we propose Causal Neighbourhood Learning with Graph Neural Networks (CNL-GNN), a novel framework that performs causal interventions on graph structure. CNL-GNN effectively identifies and preserves causally relevant connections and reduces spurious influences through the generation of counterfactual neighbourhoods and adaptive edge perturbation guided by learnable importance masking and an attention-based mechanism. In addition, by combining structural-level interventions with the disentanglement of causal features from confounding factors, the model learns invariant node representations that are robust and generalize well across different graph structures. Our approach improves causal graph learning beyond traditional feature-based methods, resulting in a robust classification model. Extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets, including multiple domain variants of one dataset, demonstrate that CNL-GNN outperforms state-of-the-art GNN models.
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