# When Graph Neural Network Meets Causality: Opportunities, Methodologies and An Outlook

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12477 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12477/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 121 of its 175 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 121)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00670/) (2016)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [Counterfactual Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06856/) (2017)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08804/) (2018)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [GNNExplainer: Generating Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03894/) (2019)
- [Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.01332/) (2015)
- [Graph Neural Networks in Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02260/) (2020)
- [Towards Out-Of-Distribution Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13624/) (2021)
- [Self-Attention Graph Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08082/) (2019)
- [Trustworthy LLMs: a Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05374/) (2023)
- [Explainability in Graph Neural Networks: A Taxonomic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15445/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Policy Network for Goal-Directed Molecular Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02473/) (2018)
- [Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00050/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Beyond Grid Data: Exploring Graph Neural Networks for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03223/) (2024)
- [Physics-Informed Neural Networks For Semiconductor Film Deposition: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10983/) (2025)
- [From Observations to Causations: A GNN-based Probabilistic Prediction Framework for Causal Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20349/) (2025)
- [Reasoning-based Anomaly Detection Framework: A Real-time, Scalable, and Automated Approach to Anomaly Detection Across Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03486/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful representation learning tools for capturing complex dependencies within diverse graph-structured data. Despite their success in a wide range of graph mining tasks, GNNs have raised serious concerns regarding their trustworthiness, including susceptibility to distribution shift, biases towards certain populations, and lack of explainability. Recently, integrating causal learning techniques into GNNs has sparked numerous ground-breaking studies since many GNN trustworthiness issues can be alleviated by capturing the underlying data causality rather than superficial correlations. In this survey, we comprehensively review recent research efforts on Causality-Inspired GNNs (CIGNNs). Specifically, we first employ causal tools to analyze the primary trustworthiness risks of existing GNNs, underscoring the necessity for GNNs to comprehend the causal mechanisms within graph data. Moreover, we introduce a taxonomy of CIGNNs based on the type of causal learning capability they are equipped with, i.e., causal reasoning and causal representation learning. Besides, we systematically introduce typical methods within each category and discuss how they mitigate trustworthiness risks. Finally, we summarize useful resources and discuss several future directions, hoping to shed light on new research opportunities in this emerging field. The representative papers, along with open-source data and codes, are available in https://github.com/usail-hkust/Causality-Inspired-GNNs.