Graph Additive Models disentangling feature, topology, and interactions

arXiv:2610.20662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph Neural Additive Networks (GNANs) have emerged as effective, interpretable-by-design architectures for graph learning. They achieve transparency by combining per-feature shape functions with simple distance-based reweighting. However, GNANs have three limitations. First, node-wise relevance scores aggregate information from all graph nodes, allowing irrelevant nodes to inherit spurious relevance from relevant ones. Second, topology is represented only through shortest-path distances, so structurally distinct graphs may share identical distance profiles. Third, feature and distance information are combined multiplicatively, entangling feature, distance, and interaction effects in a single rescalable term. We introduce AMIGA, which represents topology through a vocabulary of mined motifs and decomposes each node contribution into three additive channels: feature, structure, and feature-structure interaction. The channels are centered around a graph-balanced training baseline, making the decomposition well-defined and unique under the chosen reference distribution. Across ten graph classification and regression benchmarks, AMIGA outperforms GNAN on most datasets and narrows the gap with standard black-box GNNs. Because each channel is centered and assigned to a single node, AMIGA produces node-local explanations that reconstruct the model output exactly and support interpretation at multiple levels of granularity.