AGHINT: Attribute-Guided Representation Learning on Heterogeneous Information Networks with Transformer
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in heterogeneous graph neural networks for tasks like node classification, offering an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of node classification in heterogeneous information networks where existing models struggle when node attributes differ significantly from neighbors, and proposes AGHINT, which improves performance by guiding neighbor aggregation with attributes, achieving state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks.
Recently, heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have achieved impressive success in representation learning by capturing long-range dependencies and heterogeneity at the node level. However, few existing studies have delved into the utilization of node attributes in heterogeneous information networks (HINs). In this paper, we investigate the impact of inter-node attribute disparities on HGNNs performance within the benchmark task, i.e., node classification, and empirically find that typical models exhibit significant performance decline when classifying nodes whose attributes markedly differ from their neighbors. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel Attribute-Guided heterogeneous Information Networks representation learning model with Transformer (AGHINT), which allows a more effective aggregation of neighbor node information under the guidance of attributes. Specifically, AGHINT transcends the constraints of the original graph structure by directly integrating higher-order similar neighbor features into the learning process and modifies the message-passing mechanism between nodes based on their attribute disparities. Extensive experimental results on three real-world heterogeneous graph benchmarks with target node attributes demonstrate that AGHINT outperforms the state-of-the-art.