xLightGCN: Explainable Graph Neural Network Based Recommendation Systems with Most Influential Peers

Calder Johnson, Robin Cohen

Recommendation systems, systems that predict a user's preference for items in order to curate that user's feed, are a ubiquitous and central feature in online social networks. While they are a central piece of our modern digital infrastructure, many modern approaches are opaque black boxes, making them difficult to audit, understand, and assess the trustworthiness of. In this paper we present an exact, graph-based approach for generating explanations for decisions made by recommendation systems. We argue that in the risk-sensitive sociotechnical context of user-facing AI such as recommendation systems, explainability is a key pillar for establishing the trustworthiness of models and validating their effectiveness. We propose a technique built on LightGCN like architectures, an influential and popular class of recommendation models. We describe our approach and argue that it provides an appropriate assurance mechanism for these AI systems leading to specific advantages, including interpretable explanations and a theoretically guaranteed measure of explanation fidelity. We conclude by discussing limitations and directions for future research.