No Arabic abstract
Recently, the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) graph isomorphism test was used to measure the expressiveness of graph neural networks (GNNs), showing that the neighborhood aggregation GNNs were at most as powerful as 1-WL test in distinguishing graph structures. There were also improvements proposed in analogy to $k$-WL test ($k>1$). However, the aggregators in these GNNs are far from injective as required by the WL test, and suffer from weak distinguishing strength, making it become expressive bottlenecks. In this paper, we improve the expressiveness by exploring powerful aggregators. We reformulate aggregation with the corresponding aggregation coefficient matrix, and then systematically analyze the requirements of the aggregation coefficient matrix for building more powerful aggregators and even injective aggregators. It can also be viewed as the strategy for preserving the rank of hidden features, and implies that basic aggregators correspond to a special case of low-rank transformations. We also show the necessity of applying nonlinear units ahead of aggregation, which is different from most aggregation-based GNNs. Based on our theoretical analysis, we develop two GNN layers, ExpandingConv and CombConv. Experimental results show that our models significantly boost performance, especially for large and densely connected graphs.
Graph Neural Network (GNN) aggregates the neighborhood of each node into the node embedding and shows its powerful capability for graph representation learning. However, most existing GNN variants aggregate the neighborhood information in a fixed non-injective fashion, which may map different graphs or nodes to the same embedding, reducing the model expressiveness. We present a theoretical framework to design a continuous injective set function for neighborhood aggregation in GNN. Using the framework, we propose expressive GNN that aggregates the neighborhood of each node with a continuous injective set function, so that a GNN layer maps similar nodes with similar neighborhoods to similar embeddings, different nodes to different embeddings and the equivalent nodes or isomorphic graphs to the same embeddings. Moreover, the proposed expressive GNN can naturally learn expressive representations for graphs with continuous node attributes. We validate the proposed expressive GNN (ExpGNN) for graph classification on multiple benchmark datasets including simple graphs and attributed graphs. The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on most of the benchmarks.
While many existing graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proven to perform $ell_2$-based graph smoothing that enforces smoothness globally, in this work we aim to further enhance the local smoothness adaptivity of GNNs via $ell_1$-based graph smoothing. As a result, we introduce a family of GNNs (Elastic GNNs) based on $ell_1$ and $ell_2$-based graph smoothing. In particular, we propose a novel and general message passing scheme into GNNs. This message passing algorithm is not only friendly to back-propagation training but also achieves the desired smoothing properties with a theoretical convergence guarantee. Experiments on semi-supervised learning tasks demonstrate that the proposed Elastic GNNs obtain better adaptivity on benchmark datasets and are significantly robust to graph adversarial attacks. The implementation of Elastic GNNs is available at url{https://github.com/lxiaorui/ElasticGNN}.
While the advent of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has greatly improved node and graph representation learning in many applications, the neighborhood aggregation scheme exposes additional vulnerabilities to adversaries seeking to extract node-level information about sensitive attributes. In this paper, we study the problem of protecting sensitive attributes by information obfuscation when learning with graph structured data. We propose a framework to locally filter out pre-determined sensitive attributes via adversarial training with the total variation and the Wasserstein distance. Our method creates a strong defense against inference attacks, while only suffering small loss in task performance. Theoretically, we analyze the effectiveness of our framework against a worst-case adversary, and characterize an inherent trade-off between maximizing predictive accuracy and minimizing information leakage. Experiments across multiple datasets from recommender systems, knowledge graphs and quantum chemistry demonstrate that the proposed approach provides a robust defense across various graph structures and tasks, while producing competitive GNN encoders for downstream tasks.
As large-scale graphs become increasingly more prevalent, it poses significant computational challenges to process, extract and analyze large graph data. Graph coarsening is one popular technique to reduce the size of a graph while maintaining essential properties. Despite rich graph coarsening literature, there is only limited exploration of data-driven methods in the field. In this work, we leverage the recent progress of deep learning on graphs for graph coarsening. We first propose a framework for measuring the quality of coarsening algorithm and show that depending on the goal, we need to carefully choose the Laplace operator on the coarse graph and associated projection/lift operators. Motivated by the observation that the current choice of edge weight for the coarse graph may be sub-optimal, we parametrize the weight assignment map with graph neural networks and train it to improve the coarsening quality in an unsupervised way. Through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real networks, we demonstrate that our method significantly improves common graph coarsening methods under various metrics, reduction ratios, graph sizes, and graph types. It generalizes to graphs of larger size ($25times$ of training graphs), is adaptive to different losses (differentiable and non-differentiable), and scales to much larger graphs than previous work.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have already been widely applied in various graph mining tasks. However, they suffer from the shallow architecture issue, which is the key impediment that hinders the model performance improvement. Although several relevant approaches have been proposed, none of the existing studies provides an in-depth understanding of the root causes of performance degradation in deep GNNs. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic experimental evaluation to present the fundamental limitations of shallow architectures. Based on the experimental results, we answer the following two essential questions: (1) what actually leads to the compromised performance of deep GNNs; (2) when we need and how to build deep GNNs. The answers to the above questions provide empirical insights and guidelines for researchers to design deep and well-performed GNNs. To show the effectiveness of our proposed guidelines, we present Deep Graph Multi-Layer Perceptron (DGMLP), a powerful approach (a paradigm in its own right) that helps guide deep GNN designs. Experimental results demonstrate three advantages of DGMLP: 1) high accuracy -- it achieves state-of-the-art node classification performance on various datasets; 2) high flexibility -- it can flexibly choose different propagation and transformation depths according to graph size and sparsity; 3) high scalability and efficiency -- it supports fast training on large-scale graphs. Our code is available in https://github.com/zwt233/DGMLP.