Paper Index of XAI for GNNs in CVPR¶

Year 2022¶

1. OrphicX: A Causality-Inspired Latent Variable Model for Interpreting Graph Neural Networks.(1) Wanyu Lin, Hao Lan, Hao Wang, Baochun Li. [paper]

1. Abstract

   This paper proposes a new eXplanation framework, called OrphicX, for generating causal explanations for any graph neural networks (GNNs) based on learned latent causal factors. Specifically, we construct a distinct generative model and design an objective function that encourages the generative model to produce causal, compact, and faithful explanations. This is achieved by isolating the causal factors in the latent space of graphs by maximizing the information flow measurements. We theoretically analyze the cause-effect relationships in the proposed causal graph, identify node attributes as confounders between graphs and GNN predictions, and circumvent such confounder effect by leveraging the backdoor adjustment formula. Our framework is compatible with any GNNs, and it does not require access to the process by which the target GNN produces its predictions. In addition, it does not rely on the linear-independence assumption of the explained features, nor require prior knowledge on the graph learning tasks. We show a proof-of-concept of OrphicX on canonical classification problems on graph data. In particular, we analyze the explanatory subgraphs obtained from explanations for molecular graphs (i.e., Mutag) and quantitatively evaluate the explanation performance with frequently occurring subgraph patterns. Empirically, we show that OrphicX can effectively identify the causal semantics for generating causal explanations, significantly outperforming its alternatives.

Year 2021¶

1. Quantifying Explainers of Graph Neural Networks in Computational Pathology.(1) Guillaume Jaume, Pushpak Pati, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Antonio Foncubierta, Anna Maria Anniciello, Florinda Feroce, Tilman Rau, Jean-Philippe Thiran, Maria Gabrani, Orcun Goksel. [paper]

1. Abstract

   Explainability of deep learning methods is imperative to facilitate their clinical adoption in digital pathology. However, popular deep learning methods and explainability techniques (explainers) based on pixel-wise processing disregard biological entities' notion, thus complicating comprehension by pathologists. In this work, we address this by adopting biological entity-based graph processing and graph explainers enabling explanations accessible to pathologists. In this context, a major challenge becomes to discern meaningful explainers, particularly in a standardized and quantifiable fashion. To this end, we propose herein a set of novel quantitative metrics based on statistics of class separability using pathologically measurable concepts to characterize graph explainers. We employ the proposed metrics to evaluate three types of graph explainers, namely the layer-wise relevance propagation, gradient-based saliency, and graph pruning approaches, to explain Cell-Graph representations for Breast Cancer Subtyping. The proposed metrics are also applicable in other domains by using domain-specific intuitive concepts. We validate the qualitative and quantitative findings on the BRACS dataset, a large cohort of breast cancer RoIs, by expert pathologists. The code and models will be released upon acceptance.

Year 2019¶

1. Explainability Methods for Graph Convolutional Neural Networks.(1) Phillip E. Pope, Soheil Kolouri, Mohammad Rostami, Charles E. Martin, Heiko Hoffmann. [paper]

1. Abstract

   With the growing use of graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) comes the need for explainability. In this paper, we introduce explainability methods for GCNNs. We develop the graph analogues of three prominent explainability methods for convolutional neural networks: contrastive gradient-based (CG) saliency maps, Class Activation Mapping (CAM), and Excitation Back-Propagation (EB) and their variants, gradient-weighted CAM (Grad-CAM) and contrastive EB (c-EB). We show a proof-of-concept of these methods on classification problems in two application domains: visual scene graphs and molecular graphs. To compare the methods, we identify three desirable properties of explanations: (1) their importance to classification, as measured by the impact of occlusions, (2) their contrastivity with respect to different classes, and (3) their sparseness on a graph. We call the corresponding quantitative metrics fidelity, contrastivity, and sparsity and evaluate them for each method. Lastly, we analyze the salient subgraphs obtained from explanations and report frequently occurring patterns.