Geometry-Aware Edge Pooling for Graph Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Limbeck, Katharina, Mezrag, Lydia, Wolf, Guy, Rieck, Bastian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Limbeck, Katharina
Mezrag, Lydia
Wolf, Guy
Rieck, Bastian
author_facet Limbeck, Katharina
Mezrag, Lydia
Wolf, Guy
Rieck, Bastian
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown significant success for graph-based tasks. Motivated by the prevalence of large datasets in real-world applications, pooling layers are crucial components of GNNs. By reducing the size of input graphs, pooling enables faster training and potentially better generalisation. However, existing pooling operations often optimise for the learning task at the expense of discarding fundamental graph structures, thus reducing interpretability. This leads to unreliable performance across dataset types, downstream tasks and pooling ratios. Addressing these concerns, we propose novel graph pooling layers for structure-aware pooling via edge collapses. Our methods leverage diffusion geometry and iteratively reduce a graph's size while preserving both its metric structure and its structural diversity. We guide pooling using magnitude, an isometry-invariant diversity measure, which permits us to control the fidelity of the pooling process. Further, we use the spread of a metric space as a faster and more stable alternative ensuring computational efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our methods (i) achieve top performance compared to alternative pooling layers across a range of diverse graph classification tasks, (ii) preserve key spectral properties of the input graphs, and (iii) retain high accuracy across varying pooling ratios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11700
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Geometry-Aware Edge Pooling for Graph Neural Networks
Limbeck, Katharina
Mezrag, Lydia
Wolf, Guy
Rieck, Bastian
Machine Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown significant success for graph-based tasks. Motivated by the prevalence of large datasets in real-world applications, pooling layers are crucial components of GNNs. By reducing the size of input graphs, pooling enables faster training and potentially better generalisation. However, existing pooling operations often optimise for the learning task at the expense of discarding fundamental graph structures, thus reducing interpretability. This leads to unreliable performance across dataset types, downstream tasks and pooling ratios. Addressing these concerns, we propose novel graph pooling layers for structure-aware pooling via edge collapses. Our methods leverage diffusion geometry and iteratively reduce a graph's size while preserving both its metric structure and its structural diversity. We guide pooling using magnitude, an isometry-invariant diversity measure, which permits us to control the fidelity of the pooling process. Further, we use the spread of a metric space as a faster and more stable alternative ensuring computational efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our methods (i) achieve top performance compared to alternative pooling layers across a range of diverse graph classification tasks, (ii) preserve key spectral properties of the input graphs, and (iii) retain high accuracy across varying pooling ratios.
title Geometry-Aware Edge Pooling for Graph Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11700