Less is More: on the Over-Globalizing Problem in Graph Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Xing, Yujie, Wang, Xiao, Li, Yibo, Huang, Hai, Shi, Chuan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Xing, Yujie
Wang, Xiao
Li, Yibo
Huang, Hai
Shi, Chuan
author_facet Xing, Yujie
Wang, Xiao
Li, Yibo
Huang, Hai
Shi, Chuan
contents Graph Transformer, due to its global attention mechanism, has emerged as a new tool in dealing with graph-structured data. It is well recognized that the global attention mechanism considers a wider receptive field in a fully connected graph, leading many to believe that useful information can be extracted from all the nodes. In this paper, we challenge this belief: does the globalizing property always benefit Graph Transformers? We reveal the over-globalizing problem in Graph Transformer by presenting both empirical evidence and theoretical analysis, i.e., the current attention mechanism overly focuses on those distant nodes, while the near nodes, which actually contain most of the useful information, are relatively weakened. Then we propose a novel Bi-Level Global Graph Transformer with Collaborative Training (CoBFormer), including the inter-cluster and intra-cluster Transformers, to prevent the over-globalizing problem while keeping the ability to extract valuable information from distant nodes. Moreover, the collaborative training is proposed to improve the model's generalization ability with a theoretical guarantee. Extensive experiments on various graphs well validate the effectiveness of our proposed CoBFormer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_01102
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Less is More: on the Over-Globalizing Problem in Graph Transformers
Xing, Yujie
Wang, Xiao
Li, Yibo
Huang, Hai
Shi, Chuan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Graph Transformer, due to its global attention mechanism, has emerged as a new tool in dealing with graph-structured data. It is well recognized that the global attention mechanism considers a wider receptive field in a fully connected graph, leading many to believe that useful information can be extracted from all the nodes. In this paper, we challenge this belief: does the globalizing property always benefit Graph Transformers? We reveal the over-globalizing problem in Graph Transformer by presenting both empirical evidence and theoretical analysis, i.e., the current attention mechanism overly focuses on those distant nodes, while the near nodes, which actually contain most of the useful information, are relatively weakened. Then we propose a novel Bi-Level Global Graph Transformer with Collaborative Training (CoBFormer), including the inter-cluster and intra-cluster Transformers, to prevent the over-globalizing problem while keeping the ability to extract valuable information from distant nodes. Moreover, the collaborative training is proposed to improve the model's generalization ability with a theoretical guarantee. Extensive experiments on various graphs well validate the effectiveness of our proposed CoBFormer.
title Less is More: on the Over-Globalizing Problem in Graph Transformers
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01102