Fast and Effective GNN Training through Sequences of Random Path Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bonchi, Francesco, Gentile, Claudio, Nerini, Francesco Paolo, Panisson, André, Vitale, Fabio
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Bonchi, Francesco
Gentile, Claudio
Nerini, Francesco Paolo
Panisson, André
Vitale, Fabio
author_facet Bonchi, Francesco
Gentile, Claudio
Nerini, Francesco Paolo
Panisson, André
Vitale, Fabio
contents We present GERN, a novel scalable framework for training GNNs in node classification tasks, based on effective resistance, a standard tool in spectral graph theory. Our method progressively refines the GNN weights on a sequence of random spanning trees suitably transformed into path graphs which, despite their simplicity, are shown to retain essential topological and node information of the original input graph. The sparse nature of these path graphs substantially lightens the computational burden of GNN training. This not only enhances scalability but also improves accuracy in subsequent test phases, especially under small training set regimes, which are of great practical importance, as in many real-world scenarios labels may be hard to obtain. In these settings, our framework yields very good results as it effectively counters the training deterioration caused by overfitting when the training set is small. Our method also addresses common issues like over-squashing and over-smoothing while avoiding under-reaching phenomena. Although our framework is flexible and can be deployed in several types of GNNs, in this paper we focus on graph convolutional networks and carry out an extensive experimental investigation on a number of real-world graph benchmarks, where we achieve simultaneous improvement of training speed and test accuracy over a wide pool of representative baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_04828
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast and Effective GNN Training through Sequences of Random Path Graphs
Bonchi, Francesco
Gentile, Claudio
Nerini, Francesco Paolo
Panisson, André
Vitale, Fabio
Machine Learning
We present GERN, a novel scalable framework for training GNNs in node classification tasks, based on effective resistance, a standard tool in spectral graph theory. Our method progressively refines the GNN weights on a sequence of random spanning trees suitably transformed into path graphs which, despite their simplicity, are shown to retain essential topological and node information of the original input graph. The sparse nature of these path graphs substantially lightens the computational burden of GNN training. This not only enhances scalability but also improves accuracy in subsequent test phases, especially under small training set regimes, which are of great practical importance, as in many real-world scenarios labels may be hard to obtain. In these settings, our framework yields very good results as it effectively counters the training deterioration caused by overfitting when the training set is small. Our method also addresses common issues like over-squashing and over-smoothing while avoiding under-reaching phenomena. Although our framework is flexible and can be deployed in several types of GNNs, in this paper we focus on graph convolutional networks and carry out an extensive experimental investigation on a number of real-world graph benchmarks, where we achieve simultaneous improvement of training speed and test accuracy over a wide pool of representative baselines.
title Fast and Effective GNN Training through Sequences of Random Path Graphs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04828