Routing-Aware Explanations for Mixture of Experts Graph Models in Malware Detection
On the map: Mixture-of-experts → Expert routing strategies
Abstract (arXiv)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) offers flexible graph reasoning by combining multiple views of a graph through a learned router. We investigate routing-aware explanations for MoE graph models in malware detection using control flow graphs (CFGs). Our architecture builds diversity at two levels. At the node level, each layer computes multiple neighborhood statistics and fuses them with an MLP, guided by a degree reweighting factor rho and a pooling choice lambda in {mean, std, max}, producing distinct node representations that capture complementary structural cues in CFGs. At the readout level, six experts, each tied to a specific (rho, lambda) view, output graph-level logits that the router weights into a final prediction. Post-hoc explanations are generated with edge-level attributions per expert and aggregated using the router gates so the rationale reflects both what each expert highlights and how strongly it is selected. Evaluated against single-expert GNN baselines such as GCN, GIN, and GAT on the same CFG dataset, the proposed MoE achieves strong detection accuracy while yielding stable, faithful attributions under sparsity-based perturbations. The results indicate that making the router explicit and combining multi-statistic node encoding with expert-level diversity can improve the transparency of MoE decisions for malware analysis.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Expert routing strategies, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts. Builds on 14 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2026.
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14 of 35 references.
References · 14
- 2016Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networkscited by 11,282
- 2017Graph Attention Networkscited by 8,854
- 2019GNNExplainer: Generating Explanations for Graph Neural Networkscited by 735
- 2020Captum: A unified and generic model interpretability library for PyTorchcited by 542
- 2021On Explainability of Graph Neural Networks via Subgraph Explorationscited by 280
- 2019Explainability Techniques for Graph Convolutional Networkscited by 160
- 2023Graph Mixture of Experts: Learning on Large-Scale Graphs with Explicit Diversity Modelingcited by 63
- 2022GraphFramEx: Towards Systematic Evaluation of Explainability Methods for Graph Neural Networkscited by 57
- 2024Graph Mixture of Experts and Memory-augmented Routers for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detectioncited by 19
- 2023Learning Topology-Specific Experts for Molecular Property Predictioncited by 15
- 2025Recent Advances in Malware Detection: Graph Learning and Explainabilitycited by 6
- 2025On the Consistency of GNN Explanations for Malware Detectioncited by 5
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- 2026A Multi-task Mixture of Experts Framework for Malware Classification, Packing Detection, and Family Attribution
- 2026Evolutionary Router Feature Generation for Zero-Shot Graph Anomaly Detection with Mixture-of-Experts
- 2026MalMoE: Mixture-of-Experts Enhanced Encrypted Malicious Traffic Detection Under Graph Drift
- 2025Backdoor or Manipulation? Graph Mixture of Experts Can Defend Against Various Graph Adversarial Attacks
- 2024KnowGraph: Knowledge-Enabled Anomaly Detection via Logical Reasoning on Graph Data
- 2022ADMoE: Anomaly Detection with Mixture-of-Experts from Noisy Labels
- 2026Safety-Oriented Routing Analysis of Mixtral MoE Under Benign and Harmful Prompts
- 2024Buffer Overflow in Mixture of Experts