Efficient GNN Explanation via Learning Removal-based Attribution
This addresses the need for efficient and accurate GNN explanations for users and regulatory compliance, representing a strong specific gain in the domain of explainable AI for graph data.
The paper tackles the challenge of achieving high fidelity and low computational costs in Graph Neural Network (GNN) explanations by proposing the LARA framework, which is 3.5 times faster and achieves higher fidelity than state-of-the-art methods on a large dataset with over 160K nodes and 1M edges.
As Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely used in real-world applications, model explanations are required not only by users but also by legal regulations. However, simultaneously achieving high fidelity and low computational costs in generating explanations has been a challenge for current methods. In this work, we propose a framework of GNN explanation named LeArn Removal-based Attribution (LARA) to address this problem. Specifically, we introduce removal-based attribution and demonstrate its substantiated link to interpretability fidelity theoretically and experimentally. The explainer in LARA learns to generate removal-based attribution which enables providing explanations with high fidelity. A strategy of subgraph sampling is designed in LARA to improve the scalability of the training process. In the deployment, LARA can efficiently generate the explanation through a feed-forward pass. We benchmark our approach with other state-of-the-art GNN explanation methods on six datasets. Results highlight the effectiveness of our framework regarding both efficiency and fidelity. In particular, LARA is 3.5 times faster and achieves higher fidelity than the state-of-the-art method on the large dataset ogbn-arxiv (more than 160K nodes and 1M edges), showing its great potential in real-world applications. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LARA-10D8/README.md.