Abstract:Recent advancements in graph learning contributed to explaining predictions generated by Graph Neural Networks. However, existing methodologies often fall short when applied to real-world datasets. We introduce HOGE, a framework to capture higher-order structures using cell complexes, which excel at modeling higher-order relationships. In the real world, higher-order structures are ubiquitous like in molecules or social networks, thus our work significantly enhances the practical applicability of graph explanations. HOGE produces clearer and more accurate explanations compared to prior methods. Our method can be integrated with all existing graph explainers, ensuring seamless integration into current frameworks. We evaluate on GraphXAI benchmark datasets, HOGE achieves improved or comparable performance with minimal computational overhead. Ablation studies show that the performance gain observed can be attributed to the higher-order structures that come from introducing cell complexes.