skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Bayesian Graph Neural Networks with Adaptive Connection Sampling
We propose a unified framework for adap- tive connection sampling in graph neural net- works (GNNs) that generalizes existing stochas- tic regularization methods for training GNNs. The proposed framework not only alleviates over- smoothing and over-fitting tendencies of deep GNNs, but also enables learning with uncertainty in graph analytic tasks with GNNs. Instead of using fixed sampling rates or hand-tuning them as model hyperparameters as in existing stochas- tic regularization methods, our adaptive connec- tion sampling can be trained jointly with GNN model parameters in both global and local fash- ions. GNN training with adaptive connection sampling is shown to be mathematically equiv- alent to an efficient approximation of training Bayesian GNNs. Experimental results with abla- tion studies on benchmark datasets validate that adaptively learning the sampling rate given graph training data is the key to boosting the perfor- mance of GNNs in semi-supervised node classifi- cation, making them less prone to over-smoothing and over-fitting with more robust prediction.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1934904 1839816 1848596
PAR ID:
10209364
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Machine Learning
Volume:
37
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Graph neural networks (GNNs) rely on the assumption of graph homophily, which, however, does not hold in some real-world scenarios. Graph heterophily compromises them by smoothing node representations and degrading their discrimination capabilities. To address this limitation, we propose H^2GNN, which implements Homophilic and Heterophilic feature aggregations to advance GNNs in graphs with homophily or heterophily. H^2GNN proceeds by combining local feature separation and adaptive message aggregation, where each node separates local features into similar and dissimilar feature vectors, and aggregates similarities and dissimilarities from neighbors based on connection property. This allows both similar and dissimilar features for each node to be effectively preserved and propagated, and thus mitigates the impact of heterophily on graph learning process. As dual feature aggregations introduce extra model complexity, we also offer a simplified implementation of H^2GNN to reduce training time. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets have demonstrated that H^2GNN can significantly improve node classification performance in graphs with different homophily ratios, which outperforms state-of-the-art GNN models. 
    more » « less
  2. Graphs are ubiquitous in various domains, such as social networks and biological systems. Despite the great successes of graph neural networks (GNNs) in modeling and analyzing complex graph data, the inductive bias of locality assumption, which involves exchanging information only within neighboring connected nodes, restricts GNNs in capturing long-range dependencies and global patterns in graphs. Inspired by the classic Brachistochrone problem, we seek how to devise a new inductive bias for cutting-edge graph application and present a general framework through the lens of variational analysis. The backbone of our framework is a two-way mapping between the discrete GNN model and continuous diffusion functional, which allows us to design application-specific objective function in the continuous domain and engineer discrete deep model with mathematical guarantees. First, we address over-smoothing in current GNNs. Specifically, our inference reveals that the existing layer-by-layer models of graph embedding learning are equivalent to a ℓ 2 -norm integral functional of graph gradients, which is the underlying cause of the over-smoothing problem. Similar to edge-preserving filters in image denoising, we introduce the total variation (TV) to promote alignment of the graph diffusion pattern with the global information present in community topologies. On top of this, we devise a new selective mechanism for inductive bias that can be easily integrated into existing GNNs and effectively address the trade-off between model depth and over-smoothing. Second, we devise a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) to predict the spreading flows in the graph through a neural transport equation. To avoid the potential issue of vanishing flows, we tailor the objective function to minimize the transportation within each community while maximizing the inter-community flows. Our new GNN models achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on graph learning benchmarks such as Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed. 
    more » « less
  3. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance on various graph learning tasks. To achieve better fitting capability, most GNNs are with a large number of parameters, which makes these GNNs computationally expensive. Therefore, it is difficult to deploy them onto edge devices with scarce computational resources, e.g., mobile phones and wearable smart devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to compress GNNs, where a light-weighted model (i.e., the student model) is encouraged to mimic the behavior of a computationally expensive GNN (i.e., the teacher GNN model). Nevertheless, most existing GNN-based KD methods lack fairness consideration. As a consequence, the student model usually inherits and even exaggerates the bias from the teacher GNN. To handle such a problem, we take initial steps towards fair knowledge distillation for GNNs. Specifically, we first formulate a novel problem of fair knowledge distillation for GNN-based teacher-student frameworks. Then we propose a principled framework named RELIANT to mitigate the bias exhibited by the student model. Notably the design of RELIANT is decoupled from any specific teacher and student model structures, and thus can be easily adapted to various GNN-based KD frameworks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, which corroborates that RELIANT achieves less biased GNN knowledge distillation while maintaining high prediction utility. Open-source code can be found at https://github.com/yushundong/RELIANT. 
    more » « less
  4. Despite the recent success of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), training GNNs on large graphs remains challenging. The limited resource capacities of the existing servers, the dependency between nodes in a graph, and the privacy concern due to the centralized storage and model learning have spurred the need to design an effective distributed algorithm for GNN training. However, existing distributed GNN training methods impose either excessive communication costs or large memory overheads that hinders their scalability. To overcome these issues, we propose a communication-efficient distributed GNN training technique named (LLCG). To reduce the communication and memory overhead, each local machine in LLCG first trains a GNN on its local data by ignoring the dependency between nodes among different machines, then sends the locally trained model to the server for periodic model averaging. However, ignoring node dependency could result in significant performance degradation. To solve the performance degradation, we propose to apply on the server to refine the locally learned models. We rigorously analyze the convergence of distributed methods with periodic model averaging for training GNNs and show that naively applying periodic model averaging but ignoring the dependency between nodes will suffer from an irreducible residual error. However, this residual error can be eliminated by utilizing the proposed global corrections to entail fast convergence rate. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that LLCG can significantly improve the efficiency without hurting the performance. One-sentence Summary: We propose LLCG a communication efficient distributed algorithm for training GNNs. 
    more » « less
  5. Most state-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can be defined as a form of graph convolution which can be realized by message passing between direct neighbors or beyond. To scale such GNNs to large graphs, various neighbor-, layer-, or subgraph-sampling techniques are proposed to alleviate the "neighbor explosion" problem by considering only a small subset of messages passed to the nodes in a mini-batch. However, sampling-based methods are difficult to apply to GNNs that utilize many-hops-away or global context each layer, show unstable performance for different tasks and datasets, and do not speed up model inference. We propose a principled and fundamentally different approach, VQ-GNN, a universal framework to scale up any convolution-based GNNs using Vector Quantization (VQ) without compromising the performance. In contrast to sampling-based techniques, our approach can effectively preserve all the messages passed to a mini-batch of nodes by learning and updating a small number of quantized reference vectors of global node representations, using VQ within each GNN layer. Our framework avoids the "neighbor explosion" problem of GNNs using quantized representations combined with a low-rank version of the graph convolution matrix. We show that such a compact low-rank version of the gigantic convolution matrix is sufficient both theoretically and experimentally. In company with VQ, we design a novel approximated message passing algorithm and a nontrivial back-propagation rule for our framework. Experiments on various types of GNN backbones demonstrate the scalability and competitive performance of our framework on large-graph node classification and link prediction benchmarks. 
    more » « less