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Autori principali: Lu, Bowen, Yang, Liangqiang, Li, Teng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24304
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author Lu, Bowen
Yang, Liangqiang
Li, Teng
author_facet Lu, Bowen
Yang, Liangqiang
Li, Teng
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved impressive performance in graph-related tasks. However, they suffer from poor generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) data, as they tend to learn spurious correlations. Such correlations present a phenomenon that GNNs fail to stably learn the mutual information between prediction representations and ground-truth labels under OOD settings. To address these challenges, we formulate a causal graph starting from the essence of node classification, adopt backdoor adjustment to block non-causal paths, and theoretically derive a lower bound for improving OOD generalization of GNNs. To materialize these insights, we further propose a novel approach integrating causal representation learning and a loss replacement strategy. The former captures node-level causal invariance and reconstructs graph posterior distribution. The latter introduces asymptotic losses of the same order to replace the original losses. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in OOD generalization and effectively alleviating the phenomenon of unstable mutual information learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_24304
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CGRL: Causal-Guided Representation Learning for Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Lu, Bowen
Yang, Liangqiang
Li, Teng
Machine Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved impressive performance in graph-related tasks. However, they suffer from poor generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) data, as they tend to learn spurious correlations. Such correlations present a phenomenon that GNNs fail to stably learn the mutual information between prediction representations and ground-truth labels under OOD settings. To address these challenges, we formulate a causal graph starting from the essence of node classification, adopt backdoor adjustment to block non-causal paths, and theoretically derive a lower bound for improving OOD generalization of GNNs. To materialize these insights, we further propose a novel approach integrating causal representation learning and a loss replacement strategy. The former captures node-level causal invariance and reconstructs graph posterior distribution. The latter introduces asymptotic losses of the same order to replace the original losses. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in OOD generalization and effectively alleviating the phenomenon of unstable mutual information learning.
title CGRL: Causal-Guided Representation Learning for Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24304