Measuring What Matters: A Unified Evaluation Framework for GNN Explainability
arXiv:2607. 04600v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph eXplainable AI (G-XAI) is increasingly important for making Graph Neural Networks interpretable and accountable.
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.
arXiv:2607. 04600v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph eXplainable AI (G-XAI) is increasingly important for making Graph Neural Networks interpretable and accountable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
arXiv:2607. 14123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the proliferation of Explainable AI (XAI) techniques -- from feature attributions to sparse autoencoders -- explanations rarely influence real-world workflows.
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.
The paper introduces a synthetic ground‑truth framework for evaluating explainable AI (XAI) methods, addressing the lack of reliable evaluation procedures. By using controlled interventions to create datasets where the importance of input components is known, the framework generates ground‑truth explanations that align with the model’s actual decision process. The authors apply this approach to binary images, tabular data, and time series, and find that nine popular XAI methods exhibit significant limitations, underscoring the need for intervention‑based benchmarks.
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.
XAI-Arena proposes using large language models (LLMs) as judges to evaluate the quality of explainable AI (XAI) explanations, aiming for reproducibility, scalability, and multidimensional assessment. The framework assesses dimensions such as simplicity, clarity, task adequacy, trust calibration, actionability, transparency, faithfulness, and overall interpretability across different datasets, models, and stakeholder personas. Human validation shows a strong positive correlation between LLM-generated and human ratings (Spearman's rho = .693, p < .001), supporting the viability of LLM-based evaluations.