Knowledge Graph Completion with Counterfactual Augmentation

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated great success in Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) by modeling how entities and relations interact in recent years. However, most of them are designed to learn from the observed graph structure, which appears to have imbalanced relation distribution during the training stage. Motivated by the causal relationship among the entities on a knowledge graph, we explore this defect through a counterfactual question: “would the relation still exist if the neighborhood of entities became different from observation?”. With a carefully designed instantiation of a causal model on the knowledge graph, we generate the counterfactual relations to answer the question by regarding the representations of entity pair given relation as context, structural information of relation-aware neighborhood as treatment, and validity of the composed triplet as the outcome. Furthermore, we incorporate the created counterfactual relations with the GNN-based framework on KGs to augment their learning of entity pair representations from both the observed and counterfactual relations. Experiments on benchmarks show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods on the task of KGC, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we demonstrate that the proposed counterfactual relations-based augmentation also enhances the interpretability of the GNN-based framework through the path interpretations of predictions.