Robust Ante-hoc Graph Explainer using Bilevel Optimization

Explaining the decisions made by machine learning models for high-stakes applications is critical for increasing transparency and guiding improvements to these decisions. This is particularly true in the case of models for graphs, where decisions often depend on complex patterns combining rich structural and attribute data. While recent work has focused on designing so-called post-hoc explainers, the question of what constitutes a good explanation remains open. One intuitive property is that explanations should be sufficiently informative to enable humans to approximately reproduce the predictions given the data. However, we show that post-hoc explanations do not achieve this goal as their explanations are highly dependent on fixed model parameters (e.g., learned GNN weights). To address this challenge, this paper proposes RAGE (Robust Ante-hoc Graph Explainer), a novel and flexible ante-hoc explainer designed to discover explanations for a broad class of graph neural networks using bilevel optimization. RAGE is able to efficiently identify explanations that contain the full information needed for prediction while still enabling humans to rank these explanations based on their influence. Our experiments, based on graph classification and regression, show that RAGE explanations are more robust than existing post-hoc and ante-hoc approaches and often achieve similar or better accuracy than state-of-the-art models.