RAW-Explainer: Post-hoc Explanations of Graph Neural Networks on Knowledge Graphs

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Autori principali: Kubo, Ryoji, Difallah, Djellel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kubo, Ryoji
Difallah, Djellel
author_facet Kubo, Ryoji
Difallah, Djellel
contents Graph neural networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on knowledge graph tasks such as link prediction. However, interpreting GNN predictions remains a challenging open problem. While many GNN explainability methods have been proposed for node or graph-level tasks, approaches for generating explanations for link predictions in heterogeneous settings are limited. In this paper, we propose RAW-Explainer, a novel framework designed to generate connected, concise, and thus interpretable subgraph explanations for link prediction. Our method leverages the heterogeneous information in knowledge graphs to identify connected subgraphs that serve as patterns of factual explanation via a random walk objective. Unlike existing methods tailored to knowledge graphs, our approach employs a neural network to parameterize the explanation generation process, which significantly speeds up the production of collective explanations. Furthermore, RAW-Explainer is designed to overcome the distribution shift issue when evaluating the quality of an explanatory subgraph which is orders of magnitude smaller than the full graph, by proposing a robust evaluator that generalizes to the subgraph distribution. Extensive quantitative results on real-world knowledge graph datasets demonstrate that our approach strikes a balance between explanation quality and computational efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12558
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RAW-Explainer: Post-hoc Explanations of Graph Neural Networks on Knowledge Graphs
Kubo, Ryoji
Difallah, Djellel
Machine Learning
Graph neural networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on knowledge graph tasks such as link prediction. However, interpreting GNN predictions remains a challenging open problem. While many GNN explainability methods have been proposed for node or graph-level tasks, approaches for generating explanations for link predictions in heterogeneous settings are limited. In this paper, we propose RAW-Explainer, a novel framework designed to generate connected, concise, and thus interpretable subgraph explanations for link prediction. Our method leverages the heterogeneous information in knowledge graphs to identify connected subgraphs that serve as patterns of factual explanation via a random walk objective. Unlike existing methods tailored to knowledge graphs, our approach employs a neural network to parameterize the explanation generation process, which significantly speeds up the production of collective explanations. Furthermore, RAW-Explainer is designed to overcome the distribution shift issue when evaluating the quality of an explanatory subgraph which is orders of magnitude smaller than the full graph, by proposing a robust evaluator that generalizes to the subgraph distribution. Extensive quantitative results on real-world knowledge graph datasets demonstrate that our approach strikes a balance between explanation quality and computational efficiency.
title RAW-Explainer: Post-hoc Explanations of Graph Neural Networks on Knowledge Graphs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12558