Does the Explanation Drift Before the Guarantee? Label-Free Early Warning on Evolving Graphs

Tomasz Szandała, Damian Raczkowski

Deployed models can fail silently as the world they describe evolves. Attribution drift has served as an early warning in tabular data; we ask whether, in graph streams, a model's own explanations can forewarn the loss of nominal conformal coverage. Doing so requires repairing the naive drift statistic twice. A vanishing edge loses mask mass regardless of whether the model relied on it, so we condition the importance on edge presence. Evolving graphs also break edge identity: a relabelling that changes nothing shifts the identity-based statistic by 0.69 on synthetic graphs and 0.83 on real ego-networks, whereas aggregating over structural roles brings both to 0.0 and stays well-defined when the support changes. We test six pre-registered regimes on thirty seeds each. A two-channel monitor, tracking conditional mask mass and its distribution over roles, precedes coverage collapse by 8 to 14.5 steps across four gradual regimes (node addition, removal, replacement, and edge thinning), all surviving Holm correction. A sudden knockout yields the expected zero lead, and a harmless change triggers no alarm. Leads track the length of the transitional phase (Spearman 0.79 over 150 runs).…