Rethinking Node-wise Propagation for Large-scale Graph Learning
This work addresses the problem of inefficient and low-quality node propagation in large-scale graph learning for web applications, offering an incremental improvement as a plug-and-play optimization strategy.
The paper tackles the problem of scalable graph neural networks (GNNs) neglecting topological uniqueness in nodes, which compromises representation quality on web-scale graphs, by proposing Adaptive Topology-aware Propagation (ATP) to reduce bias and improve efficiency and performance. ATP demonstrated effectiveness in experiments on 12 datasets, including ogbn-papers100M, by enhancing performance of scalable GNNs for semi-supervised node classification while addressing computational costs.
Scalable graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising technique, which exhibits superior predictive performance and high running efficiency across numerous large-scale graph-based web applications. However, (i) Most scalable GNNs tend to treat all nodes in graphs with the same propagation rules, neglecting their topological uniqueness; (ii) Existing node-wise propagation optimization strategies are insufficient on web-scale graphs with intricate topology, where a full portrayal of nodes' local properties is required. Intuitively, different nodes in web-scale graphs possess distinct topological roles, and therefore propagating them indiscriminately or neglect local contexts may compromise the quality of node representations. This intricate topology in web-scale graphs cannot be matched by small-scale scenarios. To address the above issues, we propose \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{T}opology-aware \textbf{P}ropagation (ATP), which reduces potential high-bias propagation and extracts structural patterns of each node in a scalable manner to improve running efficiency and predictive performance. Remarkably, ATP is crafted to be a plug-and-play node-wise propagation optimization strategy, allowing for offline execution independent of the graph learning process in a new perspective. Therefore, this approach can be seamlessly integrated into most scalable GNNs while remain orthogonal to existing node-wise propagation optimization strategies. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets, including the most representative large-scale ogbn-papers100M, have demonstrated the effectiveness of ATP. Specifically, ATP has proven to be efficient in improving the performance of prevalent scalable GNNs for semi-supervised node classification while addressing redundant computational costs.