arXiv:2603.04209cs.LG2026-03被引 2

提出新方法XPlore,通过联合优化边增删与节点特征扰动,生成更可信的图神经网络反事实解释。

Beyond Edge Deletion: A Comprehensive Approach to Counterfactual Explanation in Graph Neural Networks

  • 用梯度引导联合调整图结构和节点特征,扩展反事实搜索空间。
  • 在13个真实数据集上,解释有效性提升56.3%,保真度提高52.8%。
  • 适合需要高可信解释的领域,如药物发现、金融风控等。

图神经网络(GNN)在分子生物学、社交网络分析等领域广泛应用,但其黑箱特性影响可解释性与可信度,尤其在分子毒性预测、药物发现及金融欺诈检测等高风险场景中,透明解释至关重要。反事实解释——通过最小改动使模型预测发生翻转——为揭示GNN行为提供了有效视角。本文提出XPlore,一种突破传统仅删边局限的新方法,通过梯度引导同时优化邻接矩阵与节点特征矩阵的扰动。该方法在统一梯度框架下联合执行边插入、边删除与节点特征修改,实现更丰富、更精细的反事实探索。为衡量结构与语义保真度,引入基于学习嵌入的余弦相似度指标,克服传统距离度量的不足。在13个真实与5个合成基准上,相比最先进方法,XPlore在解释有效性上最高提升56.3%,保真度提升52.8%,且运行效率相当。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly adopted across domains such as molecular biology and social network analysis, yet their black-box nature hinders interpretability and trust. This is especially problematic in high-stakes applications, such as predicting molecule toxicity, drug discovery, or guiding financial fraud detections, where transparent explanations are essential. Counterfactual explanations - minimal changes that flip a model's prediction - offer a transparent lens into GNNs' behavior. In this work, we introduce XPlore, a novel technique that significantly broadens the counterfactual search space. It consists of gradient-guided perturbations to adjacency and node feature matrices. Unlike most prior methods, which focus solely on edge deletions, our approach belongs to the growing class of techniques that optimize edge insertions and node-feature perturbations, here jointly performed under a unified gradient-based framework, enabling a richer and more nuanced exploration of counterfactuals. To quantify both structural and semantic fidelity, we introduce a cosine similarity metric for learned graph embeddings that addresses a key limitation of traditional distance-based metrics, and demonstrate that XPlore produces more coherent and minimal counterfactuals. Empirical results on 13 real-world and 5 synthetic benchmarks show up to +56.3% improvement in validity and +52.8% in fidelity over state-of-the-art baselines, while retaining competitive runtime.

图神经网络反事实解释可解释AI

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。