Rethinking Efficient Graph Coarsening via a Non-Selfishness Principle

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bai, Xu, Lu, Bin, Zhang, Kun, Chen, Shengbo, Wang, Xinbing, Zhou, Chenghu, Jin, Meng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914562662465536
author Bai, Xu
Lu, Bin
Zhang, Kun
Chen, Shengbo
Wang, Xinbing
Zhou, Chenghu
Jin, Meng
author_facet Bai, Xu
Lu, Bin
Zhang, Kun
Chen, Shengbo
Wang, Xinbing
Zhou, Chenghu
Jin, Meng
contents Graph coarsening is a graph dimensionality reduction technique that aims to construct a smaller and more tractable graph while preserving the essential structural and semantic properties of the original graph. However, most existing methods rely on pair-wise similarity matching, where each node independently searches for its best partner based on global information. This selfishness matching paradigm incurs substantial computational and memory overhead. To address this problem, we shift to a non-selfishness principle that prioritizes the collective interference of neighborhood in coarsening, and propose an efficient method named NOPE, which achieves linear memory consumption and near-linear computational complexity in the number of nodes. Furthermore, we derive a faster variant NOPE*, which reduces O(δ\dot d) interference evaluation to O(d) based on the local isotropy assumption, and consequently alleviates the computational bottleneck for high-degree nodes. Experimental results show that NOPE* achieves 1.8-10\times speedup over NOPE and surpass almost all baselines with 1-3 orders of magnitude acceleration. Meanwhile, learning on coarsened graphs yields comparable performance to original graphs, and can even show superior performance over LLM-based graph reasoning owing to compact graph information. The code can be available at https://github.com/dazonglian/NOPE-main.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Efficient Graph Coarsening via a Non-Selfishness Principle
Bai, Xu
Lu, Bin
Zhang, Kun
Chen, Shengbo
Wang, Xinbing
Zhou, Chenghu
Jin, Meng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Graph coarsening is a graph dimensionality reduction technique that aims to construct a smaller and more tractable graph while preserving the essential structural and semantic properties of the original graph. However, most existing methods rely on pair-wise similarity matching, where each node independently searches for its best partner based on global information. This selfishness matching paradigm incurs substantial computational and memory overhead. To address this problem, we shift to a non-selfishness principle that prioritizes the collective interference of neighborhood in coarsening, and propose an efficient method named NOPE, which achieves linear memory consumption and near-linear computational complexity in the number of nodes. Furthermore, we derive a faster variant NOPE*, which reduces O(δ\dot d) interference evaluation to O(d) based on the local isotropy assumption, and consequently alleviates the computational bottleneck for high-degree nodes. Experimental results show that NOPE* achieves 1.8-10\times speedup over NOPE and surpass almost all baselines with 1-3 orders of magnitude acceleration. Meanwhile, learning on coarsened graphs yields comparable performance to original graphs, and can even show superior performance over LLM-based graph reasoning owing to compact graph information. The code can be available at https://github.com/dazonglian/NOPE-main.
title Rethinking Efficient Graph Coarsening via a Non-Selfishness Principle
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13021