# Design Requirements for Human-Centered Graph Neural Network Explanations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06917 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06917/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [GNNExplainer: Generating Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03894/) (2019)
- [EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10191/) (2019)
- [Questioning the AI: Informing Design Practices for Explainable AI User Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02478/) (2020)
- [Interpreting Graph Neural Networks for NLP With Differentiable Edge Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00577/) (2020)
- [Human-Centered Explainable AI (XAI): From Algorithms to User Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10790/) (2021)
- [CF-GNNExplainer: Counterfactual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03322/) (2021)
- [Human-centered Explainable AI: Towards a Reflective Sociotechnical Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01092/) (2020)
- [Global Explainability of GNNs via Logic Combination of Learned Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07147/) (2022)
- [GREED: A Neural Framework for Learning Graph Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13143/) (2021)
- [Towards Involving End-users in Interactive Human-in-the-loop AI Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10464/) (2022)
- [Visualizing Graph Neural Networks with CorGIE: Corresponding a Graph to Its Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12839/) (2021)
- [A Co-design Study for Multi-Stakeholder Job Recommender System Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05507/) (2023)
- [RekomGNN: Visualizing, Contextualizing and Evaluating Graph Neural Networks Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11562/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are powerful graph-based machine-learning models that are popular in various domains, e.g., social media, transportation, and drug discovery. However, owing to complex data representations, GNNs do not easily allow for human-intelligible explanations of their predictions, which can decrease trust in them as well as deter any collaboration opportunities between the AI expert and non-technical, domain expert. Here, we first discuss the two papers that aim to provide GNN explanations to domain experts in an accessible manner and then establish a set of design requirements for human-centered GNN explanations. Finally, we offer two example prototypes to demonstrate some of those proposed requirements.
