MatchEx: Model-Level GNN Explanations with Multi-Granular Insights

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission16017 Authors

Keywords: Model-Level Explanations, Graph Neural Networks, Interpretablity, XAI

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where interpretability is crucial. Existing model-level explanation methods largely rely on generative models, which often produce motifs that fail to resemble real instances, cannot account for the diversity of discriminative motifs recognized by the classifier for a target class and lack mechanisms for translating global explanations to instance-level insights. We present MatchEx, a framework that discovers discriminative motifs directly from real instances by optimizing a novel matching objective. Unlike isomorphism, which can only recover identical motifs that rarely occur in real-world graphs, this objective extends beyond exact matches to provably recover semantically similar motifs, allowing generalizable explanations. The matching mechanism also enables projection of class level rationales onto individual graphs for faithful instance-level insights. When a single motif fails to explain all instances, MatchEx adaptively partitions the instances in a class into coherent subgroups with distinct rationales. Extensive experiments across six real and synthetic datasets show that MatchEx consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, delivering coherent, generalizable, and multi-granular explanations.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

Submission Number: 16017