{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/protgnn-towards-self-explaining-graph-neural","title":"ProtGNN: Towards Self-Explaining Graph Neural Networks","arxiv_id":"2112.00911","date":"2021-12-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zaixi Zhang","Qi Liu","Hao Wang","Chengqiang Lu","Cheekong Lee"],"abstract":"Despite the recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by GNNs. Existing explanation methods mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations for a trained GNN. The fact that post-hoc methods fail to reveal the original reasoning process of GNNs raises the need of building GNNs with built-in interpretability. In this work, we propose Prototype Graph Neural Network (ProtGNN), which combines prototype learning with GNNs and provides a new perspective on the explanations of GNNs. In ProtGNN, the explanations are naturally derived from the case-based reasoning process and are actually used during classification. The prediction of ProtGNN is obtained by comparing the inputs to a few learned prototypes in the latent space. Furthermore, for better interpretability and higher efficiency, a novel conditional subgraph sampling module is incorporated to indicate which part of the input graph is most similar to each prototype in ProtGNN+. Finally, we evaluate our method on a wide range of datasets and perform concrete case studies. Extensive results show that ProtGNN and ProtGNN+ can provide inherent interpretability while achieving accuracy on par with the non-interpretable counterparts.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00911v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.00911v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"protgnn-towards-self-explaining-graph-neural","repo_url":"https://github.com/zaixizhang/protgnn","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"graph-neural-network","task_name":"Graph Neural Network"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"graph-neural-network","method_name":"Graph Neural Network"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2112.00911","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}