Adaptive Graph Coarsening for Efficient GNN Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Olshevskyi, Rostyslav, Navarro, Madeline, Segarra, Santiago
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Olshevskyi, Rostyslav
Navarro, Madeline
Segarra, Santiago
author_facet Olshevskyi, Rostyslav
Navarro, Madeline
Segarra, Santiago
contents We propose an adaptive graph coarsening method to jointly learn graph neural network (GNN) parameters and merge nodes via K-means clustering during training. As real-world graphs grow larger, processing them directly becomes increasingly challenging and sometimes infeasible. Tailoring algorithms to large-scale data may sacrifice performance, so we instead consider graph reduction to decrease the amount of data used during training. In particular, we propose a method to simultaneously train a GNN and coarsen its graph by partitioning nodes via K-means clustering based on their embeddings. Unlike past graph coarsening works, our approach allows us to merge nodes during training. Not only does this preclude coarsening as a preprocessing step, but our node clusters can adapt to the learning task instead of relying solely on graph connectivity and features. Thus, our method is amenable to scenarios that are challenging for other methods, such as heterophilic data. We validate our approach on both homophilic and heterophilic node classification datasets. We further visualize relationships between node embeddings and their corresponding clusters to illustrate that our coarsened graph adapts to the learning task during training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_25706
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive Graph Coarsening for Efficient GNN Training
Olshevskyi, Rostyslav
Navarro, Madeline
Segarra, Santiago
Machine Learning
We propose an adaptive graph coarsening method to jointly learn graph neural network (GNN) parameters and merge nodes via K-means clustering during training. As real-world graphs grow larger, processing them directly becomes increasingly challenging and sometimes infeasible. Tailoring algorithms to large-scale data may sacrifice performance, so we instead consider graph reduction to decrease the amount of data used during training. In particular, we propose a method to simultaneously train a GNN and coarsen its graph by partitioning nodes via K-means clustering based on their embeddings. Unlike past graph coarsening works, our approach allows us to merge nodes during training. Not only does this preclude coarsening as a preprocessing step, but our node clusters can adapt to the learning task instead of relying solely on graph connectivity and features. Thus, our method is amenable to scenarios that are challenging for other methods, such as heterophilic data. We validate our approach on both homophilic and heterophilic node classification datasets. We further visualize relationships between node embeddings and their corresponding clusters to illustrate that our coarsened graph adapts to the learning task during training.
title Adaptive Graph Coarsening for Efficient GNN Training
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25706