Graph Neural Networks for Graph Drawing
This work addresses graph drawing for visualization tasks, offering a novel neural approach but is incremental as it builds on existing GNN and loss function techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of graph drawing by proposing Graph Neural Drawers (GND), a framework using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to create efficient and complex maps driven by differentiable loss functions, such as minimizing edge crossings, and provides quantitative and qualitative comparisons of different GNN models.
Graph Drawing techniques have been developed in the last few years with the purpose of producing aesthetically pleasing node-link layouts. Recently, the employment of differentiable loss functions has paved the road to the massive usage of Gradient Descent and related optimization algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for the development of Graph Neural Drawers (GND), machines that rely on neural computation for constructing efficient and complex maps. GNDs are Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) whose learning process can be driven by any provided loss function, such as the ones commonly employed in Graph Drawing. Moreover, we prove that this mechanism can be guided by loss functions computed by means of Feedforward Neural Networks, on the basis of supervision hints that express beauty properties, like the minimization of crossing edges. In this context, we show that GNNs can nicely be enriched by positional features to deal also with unlabelled vertexes. We provide a proof-of-concept by constructing a loss function for the edge-crossing and provide quantitative and qualitative comparisons among different GNN models working under the proposed framework.