On the Limitation and Experience Replay for GNNs in Continual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Su, Junwei, Zou, Difan, Wu, Chuan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Su, Junwei
Zou, Difan
Wu, Chuan
author_facet Su, Junwei
Zou, Difan
Wu, Chuan
contents Continual learning seeks to empower models to progressively acquire information from a sequence of tasks. This approach is crucial for many real-world systems, which are dynamic and evolve over time. Recent research has witnessed a surge in the exploration of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) in Node-wise Graph Continual Learning (NGCL), a practical yet challenging paradigm involving the continual training of a GNN on node-related tasks. Despite recent advancements in continual learning strategies for GNNs in NGCL, a thorough theoretical understanding, especially regarding its learnability, is lacking. Learnability concerns the existence of a learning algorithm that can produce a good candidate model from the hypothesis/weight space, which is crucial for model selection in NGCL development. This paper introduces the first theoretical exploration of the learnability of GNN in NGCL, revealing that learnability is heavily influenced by structural shifts due to the interconnected nature of graph data. Specifically, GNNs may not be viable for NGCL under significant structural changes, emphasizing the need to manage structural shifts. To mitigate the impact of structural shifts, we propose a novel experience replay method termed Structure-Evolution-Aware Experience Replay (SEA-ER). SEA-ER features an innovative experience selection strategy that capitalizes on the topological awareness of GNNs, alongside a unique replay strategy that employs structural alignment to effectively counter catastrophic forgetting and diminish the impact of structural shifts on GNNs in NGCL. Our extensive experiments validate our theoretical insights and the effectiveness of SEA-ER.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_03534
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Limitation and Experience Replay for GNNs in Continual Learning
Su, Junwei
Zou, Difan
Wu, Chuan
Machine Learning
Continual learning seeks to empower models to progressively acquire information from a sequence of tasks. This approach is crucial for many real-world systems, which are dynamic and evolve over time. Recent research has witnessed a surge in the exploration of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) in Node-wise Graph Continual Learning (NGCL), a practical yet challenging paradigm involving the continual training of a GNN on node-related tasks. Despite recent advancements in continual learning strategies for GNNs in NGCL, a thorough theoretical understanding, especially regarding its learnability, is lacking. Learnability concerns the existence of a learning algorithm that can produce a good candidate model from the hypothesis/weight space, which is crucial for model selection in NGCL development. This paper introduces the first theoretical exploration of the learnability of GNN in NGCL, revealing that learnability is heavily influenced by structural shifts due to the interconnected nature of graph data. Specifically, GNNs may not be viable for NGCL under significant structural changes, emphasizing the need to manage structural shifts. To mitigate the impact of structural shifts, we propose a novel experience replay method termed Structure-Evolution-Aware Experience Replay (SEA-ER). SEA-ER features an innovative experience selection strategy that capitalizes on the topological awareness of GNNs, alongside a unique replay strategy that employs structural alignment to effectively counter catastrophic forgetting and diminish the impact of structural shifts on GNNs in NGCL. Our extensive experiments validate our theoretical insights and the effectiveness of SEA-ER.
title On the Limitation and Experience Replay for GNNs in Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03534