Systematic validation of graph neural network explanations against adverse outcome pathway reactive centers for skin sensitization

Whether graph neural network (GNN) attributions capture the reactive chemistry encoded in adverse outcome pathway (AOP) annotations for skin sensitization has not been tested under a label-permutation control. We trained AttentiveFP on a 436-molecule LLNA-labeled subset (81 sensitizers) of a curated skin-sensitization dataset and extracted atom-level attributions from seven methods (integrated gradients, GradCAM, attention, GNNExplainer, PGExplainer, GraphMask, and a rank-aggregated ensemble); G