Classic GNNs are Strong Baselines: Reassessing GNNs for Node Classification

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Luo, Yuankai, Shi, Lei, Wu, Xiao-Ming
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866913565255925760
author Luo, Yuankai
Shi, Lei
Wu, Xiao-Ming
author_facet Luo, Yuankai
Shi, Lei
Wu, Xiao-Ming
contents Graph Transformers (GTs) have recently emerged as popular alternatives to traditional message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), due to their theoretically superior expressiveness and impressive performance reported on standard node classification benchmarks, often significantly outperforming GNNs. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis to reevaluate the performance of three classic GNN models (GCN, GAT, and GraphSAGE) against GTs. Our findings suggest that the previously reported superiority of GTs may have been overstated due to suboptimal hyperparameter configurations in GNNs. Remarkably, with slight hyperparameter tuning, these classic GNN models achieve state-of-the-art performance, matching or even exceeding that of recent GTs across 17 out of the 18 diverse datasets examined. Additionally, we conduct detailed ablation studies to investigate the influence of various GNN configurations, such as normalization, dropout, residual connections, and network depth, on node classification performance. Our study aims to promote a higher standard of empirical rigor in the field of graph machine learning, encouraging more accurate comparisons and evaluations of model capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_08993
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Classic GNNs are Strong Baselines: Reassessing GNNs for Node Classification
Luo, Yuankai
Shi, Lei
Wu, Xiao-Ming
Machine Learning
Graph Transformers (GTs) have recently emerged as popular alternatives to traditional message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), due to their theoretically superior expressiveness and impressive performance reported on standard node classification benchmarks, often significantly outperforming GNNs. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis to reevaluate the performance of three classic GNN models (GCN, GAT, and GraphSAGE) against GTs. Our findings suggest that the previously reported superiority of GTs may have been overstated due to suboptimal hyperparameter configurations in GNNs. Remarkably, with slight hyperparameter tuning, these classic GNN models achieve state-of-the-art performance, matching or even exceeding that of recent GTs across 17 out of the 18 diverse datasets examined. Additionally, we conduct detailed ablation studies to investigate the influence of various GNN configurations, such as normalization, dropout, residual connections, and network depth, on node classification performance. Our study aims to promote a higher standard of empirical rigor in the field of graph machine learning, encouraging more accurate comparisons and evaluations of model capabilities.
title Classic GNNs are Strong Baselines: Reassessing GNNs for Node Classification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08993