Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are proposed without considering the agnostic distribution shifts between training graphs and testing graphs, inducing the degeneration of the generalization ability of GNNs in Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) settings. The fundamental reason for such degeneration is that most GNNs are developed based on the I.I.D hypothesis. In such a setting, GNNs tend to exploit subtle statistical correlations existing in the training set for predictions, even though it is a spurious correlation. This learning mechanism inherits from the common characteristics of machine learning approaches. However, such spurious correlations may change in the wild testing environments, leading to the failure of GNNs. Therefore, eliminating the impact of spurious correlations is crucial for stable GNN models. To this end, in this paper, we argue that the spurious correlation exists among subgraph-level units and analyze the degeneration of GNN in causal view. Based on the causal view analysis, we propose a general causal representation framework for stable GNN, called StableGNN. The main idea of this framework is to extract high-level representations from raw graph data first and resort to the distinguishing ability of causal inference to help the model get rid of spurious correlations. Particularly, to extract meaningful high-level representations, we exploit a differentiable graph pooling layer to extract subgraph-based representations by an end-to-end manner. Furthermore, inspired by the confounder balancing techniques from causal inference, based on the learned high-level representations, we propose a causal variable distinguishing regularizer to correct the biased training distribution by learning a set of sample weights. Hence, GNNs would concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative substructures and labels. Extensive experiments are conducted on both synthetic datasets with various distribution shift degrees and eight real-world OOD graph datasets. The results well verify that the proposed model StableGNN not only outperforms the state-of-the-arts but also provides a flexible framework to enhance existing GNNs. In addition, the interpretability experiments validate that StableGNN could leverage causal structures for predictions.

Graph neural network (GNN), as a powerful graph representation technique based on deep learning, has shown superior performance and attracted considerable research interest. Recently, some works attempt to generalize GNN to heterogeneous graph which contains different types of nodes and links. Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HeteGNNs) usually follow two steps: aggregate neighbors via single meta-path and then aggregate rich semantics via multiple meta-paths. However, we discover an important semantic confusion phenomenon in HeteGNNs, i.e., with the growth of model depth, the learned node embeddings become indistinguishable, leading to the performance degradation of HeteGNNs. We explain semantic confusion by theoretically deriving that HeteGNNs and multiple meta-paths based random walk are essentially equivalent. Following the theoretical analysis, we propose a novel Heterogeneous graph Propagation Network (HPN) to alleviate the semantic confusion. Specically, the semantic propagation mechanism of HPN absorbes nodes local semantic with a proper weight during aggregating process, which makes HPN capture the characteristics of each node and learn distinguishable node embedding with deeper HeteGNN architecture. Then, the semantic fusion mechanism is designed to learn the importance of meta-path and fuse them judiciously. Extensive experimental results on three datasets show the superior performance of the proposed HPN over the state-of-the-arts.

As the microblogging service (such as Weibo) is becoming popular, spam becomes a serious problem of affecting the credibility and readability of Online Social Networks. Most existing studies took use of a set of features to identify spam, but without the consideration of the overlap and dependency among different features. In this study, we investigate the problem of spam detection by analyzing real spam dataset collections of Weibo and propose a novel hybrid model of spammer detection, called SDHM, which utilizing significant features, i.e. user behavior information, online social network attributes and text content characteristics, in an organic way. Experiments on real Weibo dataset demonstrate the power of the proposed hybrid model and the promising performance.