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Main Authors: Le, My, Ruiz, Luana, Dhara, Souvik
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08216
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author Le, My
Ruiz, Luana
Dhara, Souvik
author_facet Le, My
Ruiz, Luana
Dhara, Souvik
contents Learning node representations is a fundamental problem in graph machine learning. While existing embedding methods effectively preserve local similarity measures, they often fail to capture global functions like graph distances. Inspired by Bourgain's seminal work on Hilbert space embeddings of metric spaces (1985), we study the performance of local distance-preserving node embeddings. Known as landmark-based algorithms, these embeddings approximate pairwise distances by computing shortest paths from a small subset of reference nodes called landmarks. Our main theoretical contribution shows that random graphs, such as Erdos-Renyi random graphs, require lower dimensions in landmark-based embeddings compared to worst-case graphs. Empirically, we demonstrate that the GNN-based approximations for the distances to landmarks generalize well to larger real-world networks, offering a scalable and transferable alternative for graph representation learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_08216
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Landmark-Based Node Representations for Shortest Path Distance Approximations in Random Graphs
Le, My
Ruiz, Luana
Dhara, Souvik
Machine Learning
Learning node representations is a fundamental problem in graph machine learning. While existing embedding methods effectively preserve local similarity measures, they often fail to capture global functions like graph distances. Inspired by Bourgain's seminal work on Hilbert space embeddings of metric spaces (1985), we study the performance of local distance-preserving node embeddings. Known as landmark-based algorithms, these embeddings approximate pairwise distances by computing shortest paths from a small subset of reference nodes called landmarks. Our main theoretical contribution shows that random graphs, such as Erdos-Renyi random graphs, require lower dimensions in landmark-based embeddings compared to worst-case graphs. Empirically, we demonstrate that the GNN-based approximations for the distances to landmarks generalize well to larger real-world networks, offering a scalable and transferable alternative for graph representation learning.
title Landmark-Based Node Representations for Shortest Path Distance Approximations in Random Graphs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08216