Graph eXplainable AI (G-XAI) is increasingly important for making Graph Neural Networks interpretable and accountable. While a growing number of explainers are available, choosing the right method and assessing the trustworthiness of its outputs remains unclear.
The paper presents a comparative analysis of six state‑of‑the‑art counterfactual explainers for graph neural networks, focusing on methods that can both add and remove edges to alter model predictions. It evaluates these explainers across diverse real‑world and synthetic datasets, covering binary and multi‑class graph and node classification tasks, using a range of quantitative and qualitative metrics. The study highlights the trade‑offs between explanation size, coverage, and quality, aiming to pinpoint each method’s strengths and weaknesses to inform future research.
By Maria Myrto Villia, Filippos Gouidis, Theodore Patkos, Panos Trahanias
arXiv:2606. 05756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a range of applications involving graph-structured data, particularly in high-stakes domains.
By Jialiang Yin, Zheng Zhao, Linsey Pang, Bo Dong, Bin Shi, Jiaxing Zhang
Graph Machine Learning as a Service platforms now offer explainability interfaces to satisfy regulatory transparency, but this transparency can be exploited. The paper introduces a novel model extraction attack for graph classification that operates under strict black‑box constraints, using only discrete class labels and binary explanation masks. The method guides Monte Carlo edge sensitivity estimation toward decision boundaries with Hoeffding guarantees and narrows the search space using explanation subgraphs, outperforming comparable baselines on benchmark datasets.
By Ojas Nimase, Jiate Li, Yue Zhao, Yushun Dong
arXiv:2608. 14121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can solve prediction tasks by unintentionally exploiting shortcuts---that is, edges, nodes, and features that correlate with but are not causal for the prediction---which compromise their reliability in out-of-distribution tasks.
By Taraneh Younesian, Steve Azzolin, Antonio Longa, Francesco Ferrini, Vincenzo Marco De Luca, Stefano Teso
arXiv:2606. 03495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in modeling complex relational data, however their interpretability in high-stakes applications remains a critical challenge.
By Zongrui Li, Yuhang Zhao, Ying Zhao, Yuanzhao Guo, Qiang Huang, Yuan Tian
arXiv:2607. 14315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for assessing the explainability of various XAI methods, such as LIME and SHAP, across multiple datasets and machine learning models, with the ultimate goal of creating a unified multidimensional explainability score.
By Georgios Makridis, Georgios Fatouros, Athanasios Kiourtis, Dimitrios Kotios, Vasileios Koukos, Dimosthenis Kyriazis, Jonh Soldatos
The paper introduces a logic-based framework that extracts global logical rules for node classification in Simple Graph Convolution (SGC) networks. It uses minimal abductive explanations—small sets of node-feature pairs that preserve a node’s predicted class—as an intermediate step. Decision trees trained on these explanations yield compact global rules that retain high fidelity to the original SGC model, as demonstrated on benchmark datasets.
By Bryan Lima Cavalcante, Thiago Alves Rocha
arXiv:2607. 29614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of deep learning models in high-risk domains has intensified the need for trustworthy Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI).
By Christian Oliva, Luis F. Lago-Fern\'andez
arXiv:2607. 21381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instance-level explanations aim to reveal the rationale behind a model's decisions for a specific graph.
By Jiancu Chen, Shuyin Xia, Guan Wang, Degang Chen, Fan Chen
WOMBAT is a benchmark comprising 14 whitebox graph neural networks (GNNs) whose message‑passing weights are manually set to detect specific SMARTS motifs. Each model’s decision rule is explicitly known, providing a ground truth for attribution that allows researchers to identify and study errors in post‑hoc explainers such as GNNExplainer, PGExplainer, and Integrated Gradients. The authors validate the models on millions of PubChem molecules, demonstrate how Integrated Gradients can be misled to spread attribution, and release the dataset, models, and evaluation code for future XAI tool development.
By Dominik Matuszek, Bartosz Zieli\'nski, Tomasz Danel, Dawid Rymarczyk
Instance-level explanations aim to reveal the rationale behind a model's decisions for a specific graph. Previous methods explain graph neural networks (GNNs) by selecting important edges to induce subgraphs, where edge importance is assessed by perturbing each edge and observing changes in the model predictions.