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Main Authors: Tian, Haozhe, Ferraro, Pietro, Shorten, Robert, Jalili, Mahdi, Hamedmoghadam, Homayoun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00706
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author Tian, Haozhe
Ferraro, Pietro
Shorten, Robert
Jalili, Mahdi
Hamedmoghadam, Homayoun
author_facet Tian, Haozhe
Ferraro, Pietro
Shorten, Robert
Jalili, Mahdi
Hamedmoghadam, Homayoun
contents The application of message-passing Graph Neural Networks has been a breakthrough for important network science problems. However, the competitive performance often relies on using handcrafted structural features as inputs, which increases computational cost and introduces bias into the otherwise purely data-driven network representations. Here, we eliminate the need for handcrafted features by introducing an attention mechanism and utilizing message-iteration profiles, in addition to an effective algorithmic approach to generate a structurally diverse training set of small synthetic networks. Thereby, we build an expressive message-passing framework and use it to efficiently solve the NP-hard problem of Network Dismantling, virtually equivalent to vital node identification, with significant real-world applications. Trained solely on diversified synthetic networks, our proposed model -- MIND: Message Iteration Network Dismantler -- generalizes to large, unseen real networks with millions of nodes, outperforming state-of-the-art network dismantling methods. Increased efficiency and generalizability of the proposed model can be leveraged beyond dismantling in a range of complex network problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00706
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Network Dismantling Without Handcrafted Inputs
Tian, Haozhe
Ferraro, Pietro
Shorten, Robert
Jalili, Mahdi
Hamedmoghadam, Homayoun
Machine Learning
The application of message-passing Graph Neural Networks has been a breakthrough for important network science problems. However, the competitive performance often relies on using handcrafted structural features as inputs, which increases computational cost and introduces bias into the otherwise purely data-driven network representations. Here, we eliminate the need for handcrafted features by introducing an attention mechanism and utilizing message-iteration profiles, in addition to an effective algorithmic approach to generate a structurally diverse training set of small synthetic networks. Thereby, we build an expressive message-passing framework and use it to efficiently solve the NP-hard problem of Network Dismantling, virtually equivalent to vital node identification, with significant real-world applications. Trained solely on diversified synthetic networks, our proposed model -- MIND: Message Iteration Network Dismantler -- generalizes to large, unseen real networks with millions of nodes, outperforming state-of-the-art network dismantling methods. Increased efficiency and generalizability of the proposed model can be leveraged beyond dismantling in a range of complex network problems.
title Learning Network Dismantling Without Handcrafted Inputs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00706