Simple yet Effective Graph Distillation via Clustering

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Lai, Yurui, Zhang, Taiyan, Yang, Renchi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866915307133599744
author Lai, Yurui
Zhang, Taiyan
Yang, Renchi
author_facet Lai, Yurui
Zhang, Taiyan
Yang, Renchi
contents Despite plentiful successes achieved by graph representation learning in various domains, the training of graph neural networks (GNNs) still remains tenaciously challenging due to the tremendous computational overhead needed for sizable graphs in practice. Recently, graph data distillation (GDD), which seeks to distill large graphs into compact and informative ones, has emerged as a promising technique to enable efficient GNN training. However, most existing GDD works rely on heuristics that align model gradients or representation distributions on condensed and original graphs, leading to compromised result quality, expensive training for distilling large graphs, or both. Motivated by this, this paper presents an efficient and effective GDD approach, ClustGDD. Under the hood, ClustGDD resorts to synthesizing the condensed graph and node attributes through fast and theoretically-grounded clustering that minimizes the within-cluster sum of squares and maximizes the homophily on the original graph. The fundamental idea is inspired by our empirical and theoretical findings unveiling the connection between clustering and empirical condensation quality using Fréchet Inception Distance, a well-known quality metric for synthetic images. Furthermore, to mitigate the adverse effects caused by the homophily-based clustering, ClustGDD refines the nodal attributes of the condensed graph with a small augmentation learned via class-aware graph sampling and consistency loss. Our extensive experiments exhibit that GNNs trained over condensed graphs output by ClustGDD consistently achieve superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art GDD methods in terms of node classification on five benchmark datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_20807
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simple yet Effective Graph Distillation via Clustering
Lai, Yurui
Zhang, Taiyan
Yang, Renchi
Machine Learning
Despite plentiful successes achieved by graph representation learning in various domains, the training of graph neural networks (GNNs) still remains tenaciously challenging due to the tremendous computational overhead needed for sizable graphs in practice. Recently, graph data distillation (GDD), which seeks to distill large graphs into compact and informative ones, has emerged as a promising technique to enable efficient GNN training. However, most existing GDD works rely on heuristics that align model gradients or representation distributions on condensed and original graphs, leading to compromised result quality, expensive training for distilling large graphs, or both. Motivated by this, this paper presents an efficient and effective GDD approach, ClustGDD. Under the hood, ClustGDD resorts to synthesizing the condensed graph and node attributes through fast and theoretically-grounded clustering that minimizes the within-cluster sum of squares and maximizes the homophily on the original graph. The fundamental idea is inspired by our empirical and theoretical findings unveiling the connection between clustering and empirical condensation quality using Fréchet Inception Distance, a well-known quality metric for synthetic images. Furthermore, to mitigate the adverse effects caused by the homophily-based clustering, ClustGDD refines the nodal attributes of the condensed graph with a small augmentation learned via class-aware graph sampling and consistency loss. Our extensive experiments exhibit that GNNs trained over condensed graphs output by ClustGDD consistently achieve superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art GDD methods in terms of node classification on five benchmark datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster.
title Simple yet Effective Graph Distillation via Clustering
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20807