Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization with Controllable Data Augmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces OOD-GMixup, a controllable data augmentation method for GNNs that improves out-of-distribution generalization by generating virtual samples and calibrating distribution deviation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach combining graph rationale extraction, virtual sample generation, and distribution calibration to enhance OOD robustness in graph classification.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on real-world datasets.

Effectively mitigates hybrid structure distribution shift.

Improves stability across different graph datasets.

Abstract

Graph Neural Network (GNN) has demonstrated extraordinary performance in classifying graph properties. However, due to the selection bias of training and testing data (e.g., training on small graphs and testing on large graphs, or training on dense graphs and testing on sparse graphs), distribution deviation is widespread. More importantly, we often observe \emph{hybrid structure distribution shift} of both scale and density, despite of one-sided biased data partition. The spurious correlations over hybrid distribution deviation degrade the performance of previous GNN methods and show large instability among different datasets. To alleviate this problem, we propose \texttt{OOD-GMixup} to jointly manipulate the training distribution with \emph{controllable data augmentation} in metric space. Specifically, we first extract the graph rationales to eliminate the spurious correlations due to irrelevant information. Secondly, we generate virtual samples with perturbation on graph rationale representation domain to obtain potential OOD training samples. Finally, we propose OOD calibration to measure the distribution deviation of virtual samples by leveraging Extreme Value Theory, and further actively control the training distribution by emphasizing the impact of virtual OOD samples. Extensive studies on several real-world datasets on graph classification demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines.