Provably Robust Explainable Graph Neural Networks against Graph Perturbation Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Li, Jiate, Pang, Meng, Dong, Yun, Jia, Jinyuan, Wang, Binghui
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Li, Jiate
Pang, Meng
Dong, Yun
Jia, Jinyuan
Wang, Binghui
author_facet Li, Jiate
Pang, Meng
Dong, Yun
Jia, Jinyuan
Wang, Binghui
contents Explaining Graph Neural Network (XGNN) has gained growing attention to facilitate the trust of using GNNs, which is the mainstream method to learn graph data. Despite their growing attention, Existing XGNNs focus on improving the explanation performance, and its robustness under attacks is largely unexplored. We noticed that an adversary can slightly perturb the graph structure such that the explanation result of XGNNs is largely changed. Such vulnerability of XGNNs could cause serious issues particularly in safety/security-critical applications. In this paper, we take the first step to study the robustness of XGNN against graph perturbation attacks, and propose XGNNCert, the first provably robust XGNN. Particularly, our XGNNCert can provably ensure the explanation result for a graph under the worst-case graph perturbation attack is close to that without the attack, while not affecting the GNN prediction, when the number of perturbed edges is bounded. Evaluation results on multiple graph datasets and GNN explainers show the effectiveness of XGNNCert.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04224
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Provably Robust Explainable Graph Neural Networks against Graph Perturbation Attacks
Li, Jiate
Pang, Meng
Dong, Yun
Jia, Jinyuan
Wang, Binghui
Cryptography and Security
Explaining Graph Neural Network (XGNN) has gained growing attention to facilitate the trust of using GNNs, which is the mainstream method to learn graph data. Despite their growing attention, Existing XGNNs focus on improving the explanation performance, and its robustness under attacks is largely unexplored. We noticed that an adversary can slightly perturb the graph structure such that the explanation result of XGNNs is largely changed. Such vulnerability of XGNNs could cause serious issues particularly in safety/security-critical applications. In this paper, we take the first step to study the robustness of XGNN against graph perturbation attacks, and propose XGNNCert, the first provably robust XGNN. Particularly, our XGNNCert can provably ensure the explanation result for a graph under the worst-case graph perturbation attack is close to that without the attack, while not affecting the GNN prediction, when the number of perturbed edges is bounded. Evaluation results on multiple graph datasets and GNN explainers show the effectiveness of XGNNCert.
title Provably Robust Explainable Graph Neural Networks against Graph Perturbation Attacks
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04224