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Abstract
Graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have emerged as powerful tools
for analyzing graph-structured data, achieving remarkable success across
diverse applications. However, the theoretical understanding of the stability
of these models, i.e., their sensitivity to small changes in the graph
structure, remains in rather limited settings, hampering the development and
deployment of robust and trustworthy models in practice. To fill this gap, we
study how perturbations in the graph topology affect GCNN outputs and propose a
novel formulation for analyzing model stability. Unlike prior studies that
focus only on worst-case perturbations, our distribution-aware formulation
characterizes output perturbations across a broad range of input data. This
way, our framework enables, for the first time, a probabilistic perspective on
the interplay between the statistical properties of the node data and
perturbations in the graph topology. We conduct extensive experiments to
validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate their benefits over existing
baselines, in terms of both representation stability and adversarial attacks on
downstream tasks. Our results demonstrate the practical significance of the
proposed formulation and highlight the importance of incorporating data
distribution into stability analysis.