Inspired by the conventional pooling layers in convolutional neural networks, many recent works in the field of graph machine learning have introduced pooling operators to reduce the size of graphs. The great variety in the literature stems from the many possible strategies for coarsening a graph, which may depend on different assumptions on the graph structure or the specific downstream task. In this paper we propose a formal characterization of graph pooling based on three main operations, called selection, reduction, and connection, with the goal of unifying the literature under a common framework. Following this formalization, we introduce a taxonomy of pooling operators and categorize more than thirty pooling methods proposed in recent literature. We propose criteria to evaluate the performance of a pooling operator and use them to investigate and contrast the behavior of different classes of the taxonomy on a variety of tasks.
Deep learning has become the dominant approach in coping with various tasks in Natural LanguageProcessing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically represented as a sequence of tokens, there isa rich variety of NLP problems that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, thereis a surge of interests in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large numberof NLP tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview onGraph Neural Networks(GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. We propose a new taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, whichsystematically organizes existing research of GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction,graph representation learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. We further introducea large number of NLP applications that are exploiting the power of GNNs and summarize thecorresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes. Finally, we discussvarious outstanding challenges for making the full use of GNNs for NLP as well as future researchdirections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive overview of Graph NeuralNetworks for Natural Language Processing.
Deep models trained in supervised mode have achieved remarkable success on a variety of tasks. When labeled samples are limited, self-supervised learning (SSL) is emerging as a new paradigm for making use of large amounts of unlabeled samples. SSL has achieved promising performance on natural language and image learning tasks. Recently, there is a trend to extend such success to graph data using graph neural networks (GNNs). In this survey, we provide a unified review of different ways of training GNNs using SSL. Specifically, we categorize SSL methods into contrastive and predictive models. In either category, we provide a unified framework for methods as well as how these methods differ in each component under the framework. Our unified treatment of SSL methods for GNNs sheds light on the similarities and differences of various methods, setting the stage for developing new methods and algorithms. We also summarize different SSL settings and the corresponding datasets used in each setting. To facilitate methodological development and empirical comparison, we develop a standardized testbed for SSL in GNNs, including implementations of common baseline methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in representation learning on graphs and achieved state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, most existing GNNs are designed to learn node representations on the fixed and homogeneous graphs. The limitations especially become problematic when learning representations on a misspecified graph or a heterogeneous graph that consists of various types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose Graph Transformer Networks (GTNs) that are capable of generating new graph structures, which involve identifying useful connections between unconnected nodes on the original graph, while learning effective node representation on the new graphs in an end-to-end fashion. Graph Transformer layer, a core layer of GTNs, learns a soft selection of edge types and composite relations for generating useful multi-hop connections so-called meta-paths. Our experiments show that GTNs learn new graph structures, based on data and tasks without domain knowledge, and yield powerful node representation via convolution on the new graphs. Without domain-specific graph preprocessing, GTNs achieved the best performance in all three benchmark node classification tasks against the state-of-the-art methods that require pre-defined meta-paths from domain knowledge.
We aim to better understand attention over nodes in graph neural networks (GNNs) and identify factors influencing its effectiveness. We particularly focus on the ability of attention GNNs to generalize to larger, more complex or noisy graphs. Motivated by insights from the work on Graph Isomorphism Networks, we design simple graph reasoning tasks that allow us to study attention in a controlled environment. We find that under typical conditions the effect of attention is negligible or even harmful, but under certain conditions it provides an exceptional gain in performance of more than 60% in some of our classification tasks. Satisfying these conditions in practice is challenging and often requires optimal initialization or supervised training of attention. We propose an alternative recipe and train attention in a weakly-supervised fashion that approaches the performance of supervised models, and, compared to unsupervised models, improves results on several synthetic as well as real datasets. Source code and datasets are available at //github.com/bknyaz/graph_attention_pool.
Graph embedding is an important approach for graph analysis tasks such as node classification and link prediction. The goal of graph embedding is to find a low dimensional representation of graph nodes that preserves the graph information. Recent methods like Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) try to consider node attributes (if available) besides node relations and learn node embeddings for unsupervised and semi-supervised tasks on graphs. On the other hand, multi-layer graph analysis has been received attention recently. However, the existing methods for multi-layer graph embedding cannot incorporate all available information (like node attributes). Moreover, most of them consider either type of nodes or type of edges, and they do not treat within and between layer edges differently. In this paper, we propose a method called MGCN that utilizes the GCN for multi-layer graphs. MGCN embeds nodes of multi-layer graphs using both within and between layers relations and nodes attributes. We evaluate our method on the semi-supervised node classification task. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to other multi-layer and single-layer competitors and also show the positive effect of using cross-layer edges.
Advanced methods of applying deep learning to structured data such as graphs have been proposed in recent years. In particular, studies have focused on generalizing convolutional neural networks to graph data, which includes redefining the convolution and the downsampling (pooling) operations for graphs. The method of generalizing the convolution operation to graphs has been proven to improve performance and is widely used. However, the method of applying downsampling to graphs is still difficult to perform and has room for improvement. In this paper, we propose a graph pooling method based on self-attention. Self-attention using graph convolution allows our pooling method to consider both node features and graph topology. To ensure a fair comparison, the same training procedures and model architectures were used for the existing pooling methods and our method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior graph classification performance on the benchmark datasets using a reasonable number of parameters.
The central building block of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is the convolution operator, which enables networks to construct informative features by fusing both spatial and channel-wise information within local receptive fields at each layer. A broad range of prior research has investigated the spatial component of this relationship, seeking to strengthen the representational power of a CNN by enhancing the quality of spatial encodings throughout its feature hierarchy. In this work, we focus instead on the channel relationship and propose a novel architectural unit, which we term the "Squeeze-and-Excitation" (SE) block, that adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modelling interdependencies between channels. We show that these blocks can be stacked together to form SENet architectures that generalise extremely effectively across different datasets. We further demonstrate that SE blocks bring significant improvements in performance for existing state-of-the-art CNNs at minimal additional computational cost. Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks formed the foundation of our ILSVRC 2017 classification submission which won first place and reduced the top-5 error to 2.251%, surpassing the winning entry of 2016 by a relative improvement of ~25%. Models and code are available at //github.com/hujie-frank/SENet.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning of graphs broadly follow a neighborhood aggregation framework, where the representation vector of a node is computed by recursively aggregating and transforming feature vectors of its neighboring nodes. Many GNN variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite GNNs revolutionizing graph representation learning, there is limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of GNNs in capturing different graph structures. Our results characterize the discriminative power of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Networks and GraphSAGE, and show that they cannot learn to distinguish certain simple graph structures. We then develop a simple architecture that is provably the most expressive among the class of GNNs and is as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Traditional methods for link prediction can be categorized into three main types: graph structure feature-based, latent feature-based, and explicit feature-based. Graph structure feature methods leverage some handcrafted node proximity scores, e.g., common neighbors, to estimate the likelihood of links. Latent feature methods rely on factorizing networks' matrix representations to learn an embedding for each node. Explicit feature methods train a machine learning model on two nodes' explicit attributes. Each of the three types of methods has its unique merits. In this paper, we propose SEAL (learning from Subgraphs, Embeddings, and Attributes for Link prediction), a new framework for link prediction which combines the power of all the three types into a single graph neural network (GNN). GNN is a new type of neural network which directly accepts graphs as input and outputs their labels. In SEAL, the input to the GNN is a local subgraph around each target link. We prove theoretically that our local subgraphs also reserve a great deal of high-order graph structure features related to link existence. Another key feature is that our GNN can naturally incorporate latent features and explicit features. It is achieved by concatenating node embeddings (latent features) and node attributes (explicit features) in the node information matrix for each subgraph, thus combining the three types of features to enhance GNN learning. Through extensive experiments, SEAL shows unprecedentedly strong performance against a wide range of baseline methods, including various link prediction heuristics and network embedding methods.
We present graph attention networks (GATs), novel neural network architectures that operate on graph-structured data, leveraging masked self-attentional layers to address the shortcomings of prior methods based on graph convolutions or their approximations. By stacking layers in which nodes are able to attend over their neighborhoods' features, we enable (implicitly) specifying different weights to different nodes in a neighborhood, without requiring any kind of costly matrix operation (such as inversion) or depending on knowing the graph structure upfront. In this way, we address several key challenges of spectral-based graph neural networks simultaneously, and make our model readily applicable to inductive as well as transductive problems. Our GAT models have achieved or matched state-of-the-art results across four established transductive and inductive graph benchmarks: the Cora, Citeseer and Pubmed citation network datasets, as well as a protein-protein interaction dataset (wherein test graphs remain unseen during training).