# Towards Few-shot Self-explaining Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07340 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07340/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [GNNExplainer: Generating Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03894/) (2019)
- [Parameterized Explainer for Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04573/) (2020)
- [Explainability in Graph Neural Networks: A Taxonomic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15445/) (2020)
- [GraphLIME: Local Interpretable Model Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06216/) (2020)
- [Discovering Invariant Rationales for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12872/) (2022)
- [Understanding Attention and Generalization in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02850/) (2019)
- [Rumor Detection on Social Media with Bi-Directional Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06362/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Graph based Collaborative Filtering: A Linear Residual Graph Convolutional Network Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10167/) (2020)
- [CF-GNNExplainer: Counterfactual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03322/) (2021)
- [Causal Attention for Interpretable and Generalizable Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15089/) (2021)
- [Meta-GNN: On Few-shot Node Classification in Graph Meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09718/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning via Task-Aware Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13616/) (2019)
- [ProtGNN: Towards Self-Explaining Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00911/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Graph Learning for Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07916/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Graph Transformer with Adaptive Node Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03930/) (2022)
- [Graph Rationalization with Environment-based Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02886/) (2022)
- [Global Explainability of GNNs via Logic Combination of Learned Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07147/) (2022)
- [GraphSVX: Shapley Value Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10482/) (2021)
- [Property-Aware Relation Networks for Few-Shot Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07994/) (2021)
- [Stop Explaining Black Box Machine Learning Models for High Stakes Decisions and Use Interpretable Models Instead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10154/) (2018)
- [GNNInterpreter: A Probabilistic Generative Model-Level Explanation for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07924/) (2022)
- [OrphicX: A Causality-Inspired Latent Variable Model for Interpreting Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15209/) (2022)
- [Relational Learning with Gated and Attentive Neighbor Aggregator for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13095/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Learning on Graphs via Super-Classes based on Graph Spectral Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12815/) (2020)

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

- [Glance for Context: Learning When to Leverage LLMs for Node-Aware GNN-LLM Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10849/) (2025)
- [Interpretable High-order Knowledge Graph Neural Network for Predicting Synthetic Lethality in Human Cancers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06052/) (2025)
- [A graph generation pipeline for critical infrastructures based on heuristics, images and depth data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07269/) (2025)
- [Exploring Concept Subspace for Self-explainable Text-Attributed Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11986/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have spurred an upsurge of research dedicated to enhancing the explainability of GNNs, particularly in critical domains such as medicine. A promising approach is the self-explaining method, which outputs explanations along with predictions. However, existing self-explaining models require a large amount of training data, rendering them unavailable in few-shot scenarios. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Meta-learned Self-Explaining GNN (MSE-GNN), a novel framework that generates explanations to support predictions in few-shot settings. MSE-GNN adopts a two-stage self-explaining structure, consisting of an explainer and a predictor. Specifically, the explainer first imitates the attention mechanism of humans to select the explanation subgraph, whereby attention is naturally paid to regions containing important characteristics. Subsequently, the predictor mimics the decision-making process, which makes predictions based on the generated explanation. Moreover, with a novel meta-training process and a designed mechanism that exploits task information, MSE-GNN can achieve remarkable performance on new few-shot tasks. Extensive experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that MSE-GNN can achieve superior performance on prediction tasks while generating high-quality explanations compared with existing methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/jypeng28/MSE-GNN.