cs.LGMay 22, 2026

Relevant Walk Search for Explaining Graph Neural Networks

Authors: Ping XiongThomas SchnakeMichael GasteggerGrégoire MontavonKlaus-Robert MüllerShinichi Nakajima

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become important machine learning tools for graph analysis, and its explainability is crucial for safety, fairness, and robustness. Layer-wise relevance propagation for GNNs (GNN-LRP) evaluates the relevance of \emph{walks} to reveal important information flows in the network, and provides higher-order explanations, which have been shown to be superior to the lower-order, i.e., node-/edge-level, explanations. However, identifying relevant walks by GNN-LRP requires {\em exponential} computational complexity with respect to the network depth, which we will remedy in this paper. Specifically, we propose {\em polynomial-time} algorithms for finding top-KK relevant walks, which drastically reduces the computation and thus increases the applicability of GNN-LRP to large-scale problems. Our proposed algorithms are based on the \emph{max-product} algorithm -- a common tool for finding the maximum likelihood configurations in probabilistic graphical models -- and can find the most relevant walks exactly at the neuron level and approximately at the node level. Our experiments demonstrate the performance of our algorithms at scale and their utility across application domains, i.e., on epidemiology, molecular, and natural language benchmarks. We provide our codes under \href{https://github.com/xiong-ping/rel_walk_gnnlrp}{github.com/xiong-ping/rel\_walk\_gnnlrp}.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Efficient Higher-order Subgraph Attribution via Message Passing

    May 21, 2026Ping Xiong, Thomas Schnake, Grégoire Montavon +2SubgraphsGraph Neural Networks

  2. B-cos GNNs: Faithful Explanations through Dynamic Linearity

    May 19, 2026Joschka Groß, Mohammad Shaique Solanki, Verena WolfExplainabilityGraph Neural Networks