Path-based Explanation for Knowledge Graph Completion
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Abstract (arXiv)
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) by modelling how entities and relations interact in recent years. However, the explanation of the predicted facts has not caught the necessary attention. Proper explanations for the results of GNN-based KGC models increase model transparency and help researchers develop more reliable models. Existing practices for explaining KGC tasks rely on instance/subgraph-based approaches, while in some scenarios, paths can provide more user-friendly and interpretable explanations. Nonetheless, the methods for generating path-based explanations for KGs have not been well-explored. To address this gap, we propose Power-Link, the first path-based KGC explainer that explores GNN-based models. We design a novel simplified graph-powering technique, which enables the generation of path-based explanations with a fully parallelisable and memory-efficient training scheme. We further introduce three new metrics for quantitative evaluation of the explanations, together with a qualitative human evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Power-Link outperforms the SOTA baselines in interpretability, efficiency, and scalability.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2024.
Builds on
22 of 43 references.
References · 22
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- 2017Convolutional 2D Knowledge Graph Embeddingscited by 730
- 2020A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition and Applicationscited by 643
- 2019A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Towards Medical XAIcited by 404
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- 2020Explainability in Graph Neural Networks: A Taxonomic Surveycited by 384
- 2021On Explainability of Graph Neural Networks via Subgraph Explorationscited by 281
- 2021Neural Bellman-Ford Networks: A General Graph Neural Network Framework for Link Predictioncited by 275
- 2018End-to-end Structure-Aware Convolutional Networks for Knowledge Base Completioncited by 136
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- 2020Implicit Graph Neural Networkscited by 100
10 more
- 2019A Restricted Black-box Adversarial Framework Towards Attacking Graph Embedding Modelscited by 68
- 2022GStarX: Explaining Graph Neural Networks with Structure-Aware Cooperative Gamescited by 42
- 2023PaGE-Link: Path-based Graph Neural Network Explanation for Heterogeneous Link Predictioncited by 25
- 2022Rethinking Graph Convolutional Networks in Knowledge Graph Completioncited by 20
- 2020Spectral Graph Attention Network with Fast Eigen-approximationcited by 18
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- 2021Detecting Communities from Heterogeneous Graphs: A Context Path-based Graph Neural Network Modelcited by 15
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- 2023Knowledge Graph Completion with Counterfactual Augmentationcited by 13
- 2022Explaining Link Predictions in Knowledge Graph Embedding Models with Influential Examplescited by 2
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 9; 2026: 2.
11 papers.
- 2026IBCircuit: Towards Holistic Circuit Discovery with Information Bottleneckcited by 3
- 2025Paths to Causality: Finding Informative Subgraphs Within Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge-Based Causal Discoverycited by 2
- 2025Flow-Modulated Scoring for Semantic-Aware Knowledge Graph Completioncited by 1
- 2025Unifying Post-hoc Explanations of Knowledge Graph Completionscited by 1
- 2025Understanding the Embedding Models on Hyper-relational Knowledge Graphcited by 1
- 2025Separated Contrastive Learning for Matching in Cross-domain Recommendation with Curriculum Schedulingcited by 0
- 2025RAW-Explainer: Post-hoc Explanations of Graph Neural Networks on Knowledge Graphscited by 0
- 2025Beyond Prefixes: Graph-as-Memory Cross-Attention for Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2025CQD-SHAP: Explainable Complex Query Answering via Shapley Valuescited by 0
- 2025ARM-Explainer -- Explaining and improving graph neural network predictions for the maximum clique problem using node features and association rule miningcited by 0
- 2026One Pass for All: A Discrete Diffusion Model for Knowledge Graph Triple Set Predictioncited by 0
- 2026One Pass for All: A Discrete Diffusion Model for Knowledge Graph Triple Set Prediction20 Apr 2026
- 2026IBCircuit: Towards Holistic Circuit Discovery with Information Bottleneck26 Feb 2026
- 2025ARM-Explainer -- Explaining and improving graph neural network predictions for the maximum clique problem using node features and association rule mining28 Nov 2025
- 2025CQD-SHAP: Explainable Complex Query Answering via Shapley Values17 Oct 2025
- 2025Beyond Prefixes: Graph-as-Memory Cross-Attention for Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models10 Oct 2025
- 2025Understanding the Embedding Models on Hyper-relational Knowledge Graph5 Aug 2025
- 2025Unifying Post-hoc Explanations of Knowledge Graph Completions29 Jul 2025
- 2025Flow-Modulated Scoring for Semantic-Aware Knowledge Graph Completion29 Jun 2025
- 2025RAW-Explainer: Post-hoc Explanations of Graph Neural Networks on Knowledge Graphs14 Jun 2025
- 2025Paths to Causality: Finding Informative Subgraphs Within Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge-Based Causal Discovery10 Jun 2025
- 2025Separated Contrastive Learning for Matching in Cross-domain Recommendation with Curriculum Scheduling22 Feb 2025