Energy-based Epistemic Uncertainty for Graph Neural Networks

Published: 25 Sept 2024, Last Modified: 06 Nov 2024NeurIPS 2024 spotlightEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: graph neural network, uncertainty estimation, epistemic uncertainty, energy-based model
TL;DR: We introduce a graph-based EBM that achieves state-of-the-art epistemic uncertainty estimation performance and can be applied post-hoc to any GNN.
Abstract: In domains with interdependent data, such as graphs, quantifying the epistemic uncertainty of a Graph Neural Network (GNN) is challenging as uncertainty can arise at different structural scales. Existing techniques neglect this issue or only distinguish between structure-aware and structure-agnostic uncertainty without combining them into a single measure. We propose GEBM, an energy-based model (EBM) that provides high-quality uncertainty estimates by aggregating energy at different structural levels that naturally arise from graph diffusion. In contrast to logit-based EBMs, we provably induce an integrable density in the data space by regularizing the energy function. We introduce an evidential interpretation of our EBM that significantly improves the predictive robustness of the GNN. Our framework is a simple and effective post hoc method applicable to any pre-trained GNN that is sensitive to various distribution shifts. It consistently achieves the best separation of in-distribution and out-of-distribution data on 6 out of 7 anomaly types while having the best average rank over shifts on *all* datasets.
Primary Area: Graph neural networks
Submission Number: 10036
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