Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used in many modern applications, necessitating explanations for their decisions. However, the complexity of GNNs makes it difficult to explain predictions. Even though several methods have been proposed lately, they can only provide simple and static explanations, which are difficult for users to understand in many scenarios. Therefore, we introduce INGREX, an interactive explanation framework for GNNs designed to aid users in comprehending model predictions. Our framework is implemented based on multiple explanation algorithms and advanced libraries. We demonstrate our framework in three scenarios covering common demands for GNN explanations to present its effectiveness and helpfulness.
Uncovering rationales behind predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs) has received increasing attention over recent years. Instance-level GNN explanation aims to discover critical input elements, like nodes or edges, that the target GNN relies upon for making predictions. Though various algorithms are proposed, most of them formalize this task by searching the minimal subgraph which can preserve original predictions. However, an inductive bias is deep-rooted in this framework: several subgraphs can result in the same or similar outputs as the original graphs. Consequently, they have the danger of providing spurious explanations and fail to provide consistent explanations. Applying them to explain weakly-performed GNNs would further amplify these issues. To address this problem, we theoretically examine the predictions of GNNs from the causality perspective. Two typical reasons of spurious explanations are identified: confounding effect of latent variables like distribution shift, and causal factors distinct from the original input. Observing that both confounding effects and diverse causal rationales are encoded in internal representations, we propose a simple yet effective countermeasure by aligning embeddings. Concretely, concerning potential shifts in the high-dimensional space, we design a distribution-aware alignment algorithm based on anchors. This new objective is easy to compute and can be incorporated into existing techniques with no or little effort. Theoretical analysis shows that it is in effect optimizing a more faithful explanation objective in design, which further justifies the proposed approach.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely used to learn a powerful representation of graph-structured data. Recent work demonstrates that transferring knowledge from self-supervised tasks to downstream tasks could further improve graph representation. However, there is an inherent gap between self-supervised tasks and downstream tasks in terms of optimization objective and training data. Conventional pre-training methods may be not effective enough on knowledge transfer since they do not make any adaptation for downstream tasks. To solve such problems, we propose a new transfer learning paradigm on GNNs which could effectively leverage self-supervised tasks as auxiliary tasks to help the target task. Our methods would adaptively select and combine different auxiliary tasks with the target task in the fine-tuning stage. We design an adaptive auxiliary loss weighting model to learn the weights of auxiliary tasks by quantifying the consistency between auxiliary tasks and the target task. In addition, we learn the weighting model through meta-learning. Our methods can be applied to various transfer learning approaches, it performs well not only in multi-task learning but also in pre-training and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods can effectively combine auxiliary tasks with the target task and significantly improve the performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Existing Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods are mostly designed based on the idea of matching, i.e., by learning user and item embeddings from data using shallow or deep models, they try to capture the associative relevance patterns in data, so that a user embedding can be matched with relevant item embeddings using designed or learned similarity functions. However, as a cognition rather than a perception intelligent task, recommendation requires not only the ability of pattern recognition and matching from data, but also the ability of cognitive reasoning in data. In this paper, we propose to advance Collaborative Filtering (CF) to Collaborative Reasoning (CR), which means that each user knows part of the reasoning space, and they collaborate for reasoning in the space to estimate preferences for each other. Technically, we propose a Neural Collaborative Reasoning (NCR) framework to bridge learning and reasoning. Specifically, we integrate the power of representation learning and logical reasoning, where representations capture similarity patterns in data from perceptual perspectives, and logic facilitates cognitive reasoning for informed decision making. An important challenge, however, is to bridge differentiable neural networks and symbolic reasoning in a shared architecture for optimization and inference. To solve the problem, we propose a modularized reasoning architecture, which learns logical operations such as AND ($\wedge$), OR ($\vee$) and NOT ($\neg$) as neural modules for implication reasoning ($\rightarrow$). In this way, logical expressions can be equivalently organized as neural networks, so that logical reasoning and prediction can be conducted in a continuous space. Experiments on real-world datasets verified the advantages of our framework compared with both shallow, deep and reasoning models.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which can naturally integrate node information and topological structure, have been demonstrated to be powerful in learning on graph data. These advantages of GNNs provide great potential to advance social recommendation since data in social recommender systems can be represented as user-user social graph and user-item graph; and learning latent factors of users and items is the key. However, building social recommender systems based on GNNs faces challenges. For example, the user-item graph encodes both interactions and their associated opinions; social relations have heterogeneous strengths; users involve in two graphs (e.g., the user-user social graph and the user-item graph). To address the three aforementioned challenges simultaneously, in this paper, we present a novel graph neural network framework (GraphRec) for social recommendations. In particular, we provide a principled approach to jointly capture interactions and opinions in the user-item graph and propose the framework GraphRec, which coherently models two graphs and heterogeneous strengths. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework GraphRec. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/wenqifan03/GraphRec-WWW19}
How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Traditional methods for link prediction can be categorized into three main types: graph structure feature-based, latent feature-based, and explicit feature-based. Graph structure feature methods leverage some handcrafted node proximity scores, e.g., common neighbors, to estimate the likelihood of links. Latent feature methods rely on factorizing networks' matrix representations to learn an embedding for each node. Explicit feature methods train a machine learning model on two nodes' explicit attributes. Each of the three types of methods has its unique merits. In this paper, we propose SEAL (learning from Subgraphs, Embeddings, and Attributes for Link prediction), a new framework for link prediction which combines the power of all the three types into a single graph neural network (GNN). GNN is a new type of neural network which directly accepts graphs as input and outputs their labels. In SEAL, the input to the GNN is a local subgraph around each target link. We prove theoretically that our local subgraphs also reserve a great deal of high-order graph structure features related to link existence. Another key feature is that our GNN can naturally incorporate latent features and explicit features. It is achieved by concatenating node embeddings (latent features) and node attributes (explicit features) in the node information matrix for each subgraph, thus combining the three types of features to enhance GNN learning. Through extensive experiments, SEAL shows unprecedentedly strong performance against a wide range of baseline methods, including various link prediction heuristics and network embedding methods.