Joint Learning of Label and Environment Causal Independence for Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Shurui Gui, Meng Liu, Xiner Li, Youzhi Luo, Shuiwang Ji

Keywords: deep learning, graph neural network, out-of-distribution generalization, distribution shift

Abstract: We tackle the problem of graph out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Existing graph OOD algorithms either rely on restricted assumptions or fail to exploit environment information in training data. In this work, we propose to simultaneously incorporate label and environment causal independence (LECI) to fully make use of label and environment information, thereby addressing the challenges faced by prior methods on identifying causal and invariant subgraphs. We further develop an adversarial training strategy to jointly optimize these two properties for casual subgraph discovery with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments and analysis show that LECI significantly outperforms prior methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets, establishing LECI as a practical and effective solution for graph OOD generalization.

Submission Number: 9747