{"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/towards-few-shot-self-explaining-graph-neural","title":"Towards Few-shot Self-explaining Graph Neural Networks","arxiv_id":"2408.07340","date":"2024-08-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jingyu Peng","Qi Liu","Linan Yue","Zaixi Zhang","Kai Zhang","Yunhao Sha"],"abstract":"Recent advancements in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have spurred an upsurge of research dedicated to enhancing the explainability of GNNs, particularly in critical domains such as medicine. A promising approach is the self-explaining method, which outputs explanations along with predictions. However, existing self-explaining models require a large amount of training data, rendering them unavailable in few-shot scenarios. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Meta-learned Self-Explaining GNN (MSE-GNN), a novel framework that generates explanations to support predictions in few-shot settings. MSE-GNN adopts a two-stage self-explaining structure, consisting of an explainer and a predictor. Specifically, the explainer first imitates the attention mechanism of humans to select the explanation subgraph, whereby attention is naturally paid to regions containing important characteristics. Subsequently, the predictor mimics the decision-making process, which makes predictions based on the generated explanation. Moreover, with a novel meta-training process and a designed mechanism that exploits task information, MSE-GNN can achieve remarkable performance on new few-shot tasks. Extensive experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that MSE-GNN can achieve superior performance on prediction tasks while generating high-quality explanations compared with existing methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/jypeng28/MSE-GNN.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07340v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.07340v1.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":"towards-few-shot-self-explaining-graph-neural","repo_url":"https://github.com/jypeng28/mse-gnn","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2408.07340","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}