Graph Size-imbalanced Learning with Energy-guided Structural Smoothing
This addresses performance degradation in graph classification for domains like molecules and social networks under imbalanced data conditions, representing an incremental improvement with a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of size-imbalanced graphs in multi-graph classification, where a long-tailed distribution of node numbers degrades Graph Neural Network performance, and proposes the SIMBA framework to smooth structural discrepancies, achieving superior effectiveness on five public datasets.
Graph is a prevalent data structure employed to represent the relationships between entities, frequently serving as a tool to depict and simulate numerous systems, such as molecules and social networks. However, real-world graphs usually suffer from the size-imbalanced problem in the multi-graph classification, i.e., a long-tailed distribution with respect to the number of nodes. Recent studies find that off-the-shelf Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) would compromise model performance under the long-tailed settings. We investigate this phenomenon and discover that the long-tailed graph distribution greatly exacerbates the discrepancies in structural features. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel energy-based size-imbalanced learning framework named \textbf{SIMBA}, which smooths the features between head and tail graphs and re-weights them based on the energy propagation. Specifically, we construct a higher-level graph abstraction named \textit{Graphs-to-Graph} according to the correlations between graphs to link independent graphs and smooths the structural discrepancies. We further devise an energy-based message-passing belief propagation method for re-weighting lower compatible graphs in the training process and further smooth local feature discrepancies. Extensive experimental results over five public size-imbalanced datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness of the model for size-imbalanced graph classification tasks.