Explaining graphs and their target Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has gained attention with the growing use of GNNs. Most existing explainable AI (XAI) methods for GNNs focus on extracting an explanation subgraph and assume the target GNN is supervised with accessible class probabilities. However, the growing prevalence of GNN models in unsupervised settings underscores the necessity for task-irrelevant explanations. Moreover, most existing studies scarcely explore whether identifying edges absent from the original graph can improve explanation quality. To this end, we propose HINT-G (Harnessing INfluence function for Task-irrelevant explanation on Graph neural networks), a method that uses influence functions to explain models across diverse learning paradigms and considers edges beyond the given graph. The influence of an edge can be determined directly or by aggregating the influence scores of its constituent nodes, while the influence of a non-existent edge can also be determined. Furthermore, this method is task-irrelevant, since the influence score can be obtained whenever the loss function of the target model is differentiable. Experimental results on several datasets consistently demonstrate that HINT-G effectively explains graphs through the influence function framework. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/cycy-kim/HINT-G.

Recent Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods encapsulating relational information via masking in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising performance. However, most existing approaches rely on random masking strategies in either feature or graph space, which may fail to capture task-relevant information fully. We posit that this limitation stems from an inability to achieve minimum redundancy between masked and unmasked components while ensuring maximum relevance of both to potential downstream tasks. Conditional Independence (CI) inherently satisfies the minimum redundancy and maximum relevance criteria, but its application typically requires access to downstream labels. To address this challenge, we introduce CIMAGE, a novel approach that leverages Conditional Independence to guide an effective masking strategy within the latent space. CIMAGE utilizes CI-aware latent factor decomposition to generate two distinct contexts, leveraging high- confidence pseudo-labels derived from unsupervised graph clustering. In this framework, the pretext task involves reconstructing the masked second context solely from the information provided by the first context. Our theoretical analysis further supports the superiority of CIMAGE's novel CI-aware masking method by demonstrating that the learned embedding exhibits approximate linear separability, which enables accurate predictions for the downstream task. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse graph benchmark illustrate the advantage of CIMAGE, with notably higher average rankings on node classification and link prediction tasks. Notably, our proposed model highlights the under-explored potential of CI in enhancing graph SSL methodologies and offers enriched insights for effective graph representation learning.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) in graphs has garnered significant attention, particularly in employing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with pretext tasks initially designed for other domains, such as contrastive learning and feature reconstruction. However, it remains uncertain whether these methods effectively reflect essential graph properties, precisely representation similarity with its neighbors. We observe that existing methods position opposite ends of a spectrum driven by the graph embedding smoothness, with each end corresponding to outperformance on specific downstream tasks. Decomposing the SSL objective into three terms via an information-theoretic framework with a neighbor representation variable reveals that this polarization stems from an imbalance among the terms, which existing methods may not effectively maintain. Further insights suggest that balancing between the extremes can lead to improved performance across a wider range of downstream tasks. A framework, BSG (Balancing Smoothness in Graph SSL), introduces novel loss functions designed to supplement the representation quality in graph-based SSL by balancing the derived three terms: neighbor loss, minimal loss, and divergence loss. We present a rigorous theoretical analysis of the effects of these loss functions, highlighting their significance from both the SSL and graph smoothness perspectives. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets across node classification and link prediction consistently demonstrate that BSG achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/steve30572/BSG.

Numerical reasoning is an essential task for supporting machine learning applications, such as recommendation and information retrieval. The reasoning task aims to compare two items and infer new facts (e.g., is taller than) by leveraging existing relational information and numerical attributes (e.g., the height of an entity) in knowledge graphs. However, most existing methods rely on leveraging attribute encoders or additional loss functions to predict numerical relations. Therefore, the prediction performance is often not robust in cases when attributes are sparsely observed. In this paper, we propose a Relation-AAware attribute representation learning-based Knowledge Graph Embedding method for numerical reasoning tasks, which we call RAKGE. RAKGE incorporates a newly proposed attribute representation learning mechanism, which can leverage the association between relations and their corresponding numerical attributes. In addition, we introduce a robust self-supervised learning method to generate unseen positive and negative examples, thereby making our approach more reliable when numerical attributes are sparsely available. In the evaluation of three real-world datasets, our proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art methods, achieving an improvement of up to 65.1% in Hits@1 and up to 52.6% in MRR compared to the best competitor. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/learndatalab/RAKGE.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide effective representations for recommendation tasks. GNN-based recommendation systems (GNN-Rs) capture the complex high-order connectivity between users and items by aggregating information from distant neighbors and can improve the performance of recommender systems. Recently, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have also been incorporated into the user-item interaction graph to provide more abundant contextual information; they are exploited to address cold-start problems and enable more explainable aggregation in GNN-Rs. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of users and items, developing an effective aggregation strategy that works across multiple GNN-Rs, such as LightGCN and KGAT, remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement learning-based message passing framework for recommender systems, which we call DPAO (Dual Policy learning framework for Aggregation Optimization). This framework adaptively determines high-order connectivity to aggregate users and items using dual policy learning. Dual policy learning leverages two Deep-Q-Network models to exploit the user- and item-aware feedback from a GNN-R and boost the performance of the target GNN-R. Our proposed framework was evaluated with both non-KG-based and KG-based GNN-R models on six real-world datasets, and their results show that our proposed framework significantly enhances the recent base model, improving nDCG and Recall by up to 63.7% and 42.9%, respectively. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/steve30572/DPAO/.