论文标题
图形卷积应该信任邻居吗?一个简单的因果推理方法
Should Graph Convolution Trust Neighbors? A Simple Causal Inference Method
论文作者
论文摘要
图卷积网络(GCN)是用于信息检索(IR)应用的新兴技术。虽然GCN假定图形的同质属性,但实际图从来都不是完美的:节点的局部结构可能包含差异,例如,节点邻居的标签可能会有所不同。这促使我们考虑GCN建模中局部结构的差异。现有工作通过引入其他模块(例如图形注意力)来解决这个问题,该模块有望学习每个邻居的贡献。但是,这样的模块可能无法像预期的那样可靠地工作,尤其是在缺少监督信号时,例如,当标记的数据很小时。此外,现有的方法着重于对训练数据中的节点进行建模,并且从不考虑测试节点的局部结构差异。 这项工作着重于测试节点的本地结构差异问题,该问题几乎没有受到审查。从因果关系的新角度来看,我们研究了GCN在预测其标签时是否应该信任测试节点的局部结构。为此,我们通过因果图分析了GCN的工作机制,估计了节点局部结构对预测的因果效应。这个想法简单而有效:鉴于训练有素的GCN模型,我们首先通过阻止图形结构来干预预测。然后,我们将原始预测与中间预测进行比较,以评估局部结构对预测的因果影响。通过这种方式,我们可以消除局部结构差异的影响并进行更准确的预测。在七个节点分类数据集上进行的广泛实验表明,我们的方法有效地增强了GCN的推理阶段。
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is an emerging technique for information retrieval (IR) applications. While GCN assumes the homophily property of a graph, real-world graphs are never perfect: the local structure of a node may contain discrepancy, e.g., the labels of a node's neighbors could vary. This pushes us to consider the discrepancy of local structure in GCN modeling. Existing work approaches this issue by introducing an additional module such as graph attention, which is expected to learn the contribution of each neighbor. However, such module may not work reliably as expected, especially when there lacks supervision signal, e.g., when the labeled data is small. Moreover, existing methods focus on modeling the nodes in the training data, and never consider the local structure discrepancy of testing nodes. This work focuses on the local structure discrepancy issue for testing nodes, which has received little scrutiny. From a novel perspective of causality, we investigate whether a GCN should trust the local structure of a testing node when predicting its label. To this end, we analyze the working mechanism of GCN with causal graph, estimating the causal effect of a node's local structure for the prediction. The idea is simple yet effective: given a trained GCN model, we first intervene the prediction by blocking the graph structure; we then compare the original prediction with the intervened prediction to assess the causal effect of the local structure on the prediction. Through this way, we can eliminate the impact of local structure discrepancy and make more accurate prediction. Extensive experiments on seven node classification datasets show that our method effectively enhances the inference stage of GCN.