Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Duan, Zhihua, Wang, Jialin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01888
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912257556873216
author Duan, Zhihua
Wang, Jialin
author_facet Duan, Zhihua
Wang, Jialin
contents Integrating the structural inductive biases of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with the global contextual modeling capabilities of Transformers represents a pivotal challenge in graph representation learning. While GNNs excel at capturing localized topological patterns through message-passing mechanisms, their inherent limitations in modeling long-range dependencies and parallelizability hinder their deployment in large-scale scenarios. Conversely, Transformers leverage self-attention mechanisms to achieve global receptive fields but struggle to inherit the intrinsic graph structural priors of GNNs. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework that systematically transfers multiscale structural knowledge from GNN teacher models to Transformer student models, offering a new perspective on addressing the critical challenges in cross-architectural distillation. The framework effectively bridges the architectural gap between GNNs and Transformers through micro-macro distillation losses and multiscale feature alignment. This work establishes a new paradigm for inheriting graph structural biases in Transformer architectures, with broad application prospects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_01888
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Transformer with GNN Structural Knowledge via Distillation: A Novel Approach
Duan, Zhihua
Wang, Jialin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Integrating the structural inductive biases of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with the global contextual modeling capabilities of Transformers represents a pivotal challenge in graph representation learning. While GNNs excel at capturing localized topological patterns through message-passing mechanisms, their inherent limitations in modeling long-range dependencies and parallelizability hinder their deployment in large-scale scenarios. Conversely, Transformers leverage self-attention mechanisms to achieve global receptive fields but struggle to inherit the intrinsic graph structural priors of GNNs. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework that systematically transfers multiscale structural knowledge from GNN teacher models to Transformer student models, offering a new perspective on addressing the critical challenges in cross-architectural distillation. The framework effectively bridges the architectural gap between GNNs and Transformers through micro-macro distillation losses and multiscale feature alignment. This work establishes a new paradigm for inheriting graph structural biases in Transformer architectures, with broad application prospects.
title Enhancing Transformer with GNN Structural Knowledge via Distillation: A Novel Approach
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01888