Despite plentiful successes achieved by graph representation learning in various domains, the training of graph neural networks (GNNs) still remains tenaciously challenging due to the tremendous computational overhead needed for sizable graphs in practice. Recently, graph data distillation (GDD), which seeks to distill large graphs into compact and informative ones, has emerged as a promising technique to enable efficient GNN training. However, most existing GDD works rely on heuristics that align model gradients or representation distributions on condensed and original graphs, leading to compromised result quality, expensive training for distilling large graphs, or both. Motivated by this, this paper presents an efficient and effective GDD approach, ClustGDD. Under the hood, ClustGDD resorts to synthesizing the condensed graph and node attributes through fast and theoretically-grounded clustering that minimizes the within-cluster sum of squares and maximizes the homophily on the original graph. The fundamental idea is inspired by our empirical and theoretical findings unveiling the connection between clustering and empirical condensation quality using Fr\'echet Inception Distance, a well-known quality metric for synthetic images. Furthermore, to mitigate the adverse effects caused by the homophily-based clustering, ClustGDD refines the nodal attributes of the condensed graph with a small augmentation learned via class-aware graph sampling and consistency loss. Our extensive experiments exhibit that GNNs trained over condensed graphs output by ClustGDD consistently achieve superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art GDD methods in terms of node classification on five benchmark datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster.
Neural network inference typically operates on raw input data, increasing the risk of exposure during preprocessing and inference. Moreover, neural architectures lack efficient built-in mechanisms for directly authenticating input data. This work introduces a novel encryption method for ensuring the security of neural inference. By constructing key-conditioned chaotic graph dynamical systems, we enable the encryption and decryption of real-valued tensors within the neural architecture. The proposed dynamical systems are particularly suited to encryption due to their sensitivity to initial conditions and their capacity to produce complex, key-dependent nonlinear transformations from compact rules. This work establishes a paradigm for securing neural inference and opens new avenues for research on the application of graph dynamical systems in neural network security.
We propose a history-driven target (HDT) framework in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to improve any random walk algorithm on discrete state spaces, such as general undirected graphs, for efficient sampling from target distribution $\boldsymbol{\mu}$. With broad applications in network science and distributed optimization, recent innovations like the self-repellent random walk (SRRW) achieve near-zero variance by prioritizing under-sampled states through transition kernel modifications based on past visit frequencies. However, SRRW's reliance on explicit computation of transition probabilities for all neighbors at each step introduces substantial computational overhead, while its strict dependence on time-reversible Markov chains excludes advanced non-reversible MCMC methods. To overcome these limitations, instead of direct modification of transition kernel, HDT introduces a history-dependent target distribution $\boldsymbol{\pi}[\mathbf{x}]$ to replace the original target $\boldsymbol{\mu}$ in any graph sampler, where $\mathbf{x}$ represents the empirical measure of past visits. This design preserves lightweight implementation by requiring only local information between the current and proposed states and achieves compatibility with both reversible and non-reversible MCMC samplers, while retaining unbiased samples with target distribution $\boldsymbol{\mu}$ and near-zero variance performance. Extensive experiments in graph sampling demonstrate consistent performance gains, and a memory-efficient Least Recently Used (LRU) cache ensures scalability to large general graphs.
Inductive Recommender Systems are capable of recommending for new users and with new items thus avoiding the need to retrain after new data reaches the system. However, these methods are still trained on all the data available, requiring multiple days to train a single model, without counting hyperparameter tuning. In this work we focus on graph-based recommender systems, i.e., systems that model the data as a heterogeneous network. In other applications, graph sampling allows to study a subgraph and generalize the findings to the original graph. Thus, we investigate the applicability of sampling techniques for this task. We test on three real world datasets, with three state-of-the-art inductive methods, and using six different sampling methods. We find that its possible to maintain performance using only 50% of the training data with up to 86% percent decrease in training time; however, using less training data leads to far worse performance. Further, we find that when it comes to data for recommendations, graph sampling should also account for the temporal dimension. Therefore, we find that if higher data reduction is needed, new graph based sampling techniques should be studied and new inductive methods should be designed.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used for learning node embeddings in graphs, typically adopting a message-passing scheme. This approach, however, leads to the neighbor explosion problem, with exponentially growing computational and memory demands as layers increase. Graph sampling has become the predominant method for scaling GNNs to large graphs, mitigating but not fully solving the issue. Pre-propagation GNNs (PP-GNNs) represent a new class of models that decouple feature propagation from training through pre-processing, addressing neighbor explosion in theory. Yet, their practical advantages and system-level optimizations remain underexplored. This paper provides a comprehensive characterization of PP-GNNs, comparing them with graph-sampling-based methods in training efficiency, scalability, and accuracy. While PP-GNNs achieve comparable accuracy, we identify data loading as the key bottleneck for training efficiency and input expansion as a major scalability challenge. To address these issues, we propose optimized data loading schemes and tailored training methods that improve PP-GNN training throughput by an average of 15$\times$ over the PP-GNN baselines, with speedup of up to 2 orders of magnitude compared to sampling-based GNNs on large graph benchmarks. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/cornell-zhang/preprop-gnn.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have delivered remarkable results in various fields. However, the rapid increase in the scale of graph data has introduced significant performance bottlenecks for GNN inference. Both computational complexity and memory usage have risen dramatically, with memory becoming a critical limitation. Although graph sampling-based subgraph learning methods can help mitigate computational and memory demands, they come with drawbacks such as information loss and high redundant computation among subgraphs. This paper introduces an innovative processing paradgim for distributed graph learning that abstracts GNNs with a new set of programming interfaces and leverages Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation technology to its full potential. This paradigm enables GNNs to highly exploit the computational resources of distributed clusters by eliminating the drawbacks of subgraph learning methods, leading to a more efficient inference process. Our experimental results demonstrate that on industry-scale graphs of up to \textbf{500 million nodes and 22.4 billion edges}, our method can produce a performance boost of up to \textbf{27.4 times}.
Graph sampling based Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) decouple the sampling from the forward and backward propagation during minibatch training, which exhibit good scalability in terms of layer depth and graph size. We propose HIS_GCNs, a hierarchical importance graph sampling based learning method. By constructing minibatches using sampled subgraphs, HIS_GCNs gives attention to the importance of both core and periphery nodes/edges in a scale-free training graph. Specifically, it preserves the centrum of the core to most minibatches, which maintains connectivity between periphery nodes, and samples periphery edges without core node interference, in order to keep more long chains composed entirely of low-degree nodes in the same minibatch. HIS_GCNs can maximize the discrete Ricci curvature (i.e., Ollivier-Ricci curvatures) of the edges in a subgraph that enables the preservation of important chains for information propagation, and can achieve a low node embedding variance and a high convergence speed. Diverse experiments on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with node classification tasks confirm superior performance of HIS_GCNs in both accuracy and training time. Open sourced code (https://github.com/HuQiaCHN/HIS-GCN).
The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various domains has led researchers to apply them to graph-related problems by converting graph data into natural language text. However, unlike graph data, natural language inherently has sequential order. We observe a counter-intuitive fact that when the order of nodes or edges in the natural language description of a graph is shuffled, despite describing the same graph, model performance fluctuates between high performance and random guessing. Additionally, due to LLMs' limited input context length, current methods typically randomly sample neighbors of target nodes as representatives of their neighborhood, which may not always be effective for accurate reasoning. To address these gaps, we introduce GraphSOS (Graph Sampling and Order Selection). This novel model framework features an Order Selector Module to ensure proper serialization order of the graph and a Subgraph Sampling Module to sample subgraphs with better structure for better reasoning. Furthermore, we propose Graph CoT obtained through distillation, and enhance LLM's reasoning and zero-shot learning capabilities for graph tasks through instruction tuning. Experiments on multiple datasets for node classification and graph question-answering demonstrate that GraphSOS improves LLMs' performance and generalization ability on graph tasks.
This paper introduces Localized Bipartite Match Graph Attention Q-Learning (BMG-Q), a novel Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm framework tailored for ride-pooling order dispatch. BMG-Q advances ride-pooling decision-making process with the localized bipartite match graph underlying the Markov Decision Process, enabling the development of novel Graph Attention Double Deep Q Network (GATDDQN) as the MARL backbone to capture the dynamic interactions among ride-pooling vehicles in fleet. Our approach enriches the state information for each agent with GATDDQN by leveraging a localized bipartite interdependence graph and enables a centralized global coordinator to optimize order matching and agent behavior using Integer Linear Programming (ILP). Enhanced by gradient clipping and localized graph sampling, our GATDDQN improves scalability and robustness. Furthermore, the inclusion of a posterior score function in the ILP captures the online exploration-exploitation trade-off and reduces the potential overestimation bias of agents, thereby elevating the quality of the derived solutions. Through extensive experiments and validation, BMG-Q has demonstrated superior performance in both training and operations for thousands of vehicle agents, outperforming benchmark reinforcement learning frameworks by around 10% in accumulative rewards and showing a significant reduction in overestimation bias by over 50%. Additionally, it maintains robustness amidst task variations and fleet size changes, establishing BMG-Q as an effective, scalable, and robust framework for advancing ride-pooling order dispatch operations.
This work introduces a novel graph neural networks (GNNs)-based method to predict stream water temperature and reduce model bias across locations of different income and education levels. Traditional physics-based models often have limited accuracy because they are necessarily approximations of reality. Recently, there has been an increasing interest of using GNNs in modeling complex water dynamics in stream networks. Despite their promise in improving the accuracy, GNNs can bring additional model bias through the aggregation process, where node features are updated by aggregating neighboring nodes. The bias can be especially pronounced when nodes with similar sensitive attributes are frequently connected. We introduce a new method that leverages physical knowledge to represent the node influence in GNNs, and then utilizes physics-based influence to refine the selection and weights over the neighbors. The objective is to facilitate equitable treatment over different sensitive groups in the graph aggregation, which helps reduce spatial bias over locations, especially for those in underprivileged groups. The results on the Delaware River Basin demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in preserving equitable performance across locations in different sensitive groups.
We explore the problem of sampling graph signals in scenarios where the graph structure is not predefined and must be inferred from data. In this scenario, existing approaches rely on a two-step process, where a graph is learned first, followed by sampling. More generally, graph learning and graph signal sampling have been studied as two independent problems in the literature. This work provides a foundational step towards jointly optimizing the graph structure and sampling set. Our main contribution, Vertex Importance Sampling (VIS), is to show that the sampling set can be effectively determined from the vertex importance (node weights) obtained from graph learning. We further propose Vertex Importance Sampling with Repulsion (VISR), a greedy algorithm where spatially -separated "important" nodes are selected to ensure better reconstruction. Empirical results on simulated data show that sampling using VIS and VISR leads to competitive reconstruction performance and lower complexity than the conventional two-step approach of graph learning followed by graph sampling.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in many graph machine learning tasks but face challenges when scaling to large networks. GNN transferability allows training on smaller graphs and applying the model to larger ones, but existing methods often rely on random subsampling, leading to disconnected subgraphs and reduced model expressivity. We propose a novel graph sampling algorithm that leverages feature homophily to preserve graph structure. By minimizing the trace of the data correlation matrix, our method better preserves the graph Laplacian trace -- a proxy for the graph connectivity -- than random sampling, while achieving lower complexity than spectral methods. Experiments on citation networks show improved performance in preserving Laplacian trace and GNN transferability compared to random sampling.
Sentiment analysis and emotion recognition in videos are challenging tasks, given the diversity and complexity of the information conveyed in different modalities. Developing a highly competent framework that effectively addresses the distinct characteristics across various modalities is a primary concern in this domain. Previous studies on combined multimodal sentiment and emotion analysis often overlooked effective fusion for modality integration, intermodal contextual congruity, optimizing concatenated feature spaces, leading to suboptimal architecture. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages the multi-modal contextual information from utterances and applies metaheuristic algorithms to learn the contributing features for utterance-level sentiment and emotion prediction. Our Graph-enhanced Cross-Modal Infusion with a Metaheuristic-Driven Network (GCM-Net) integrates graph sampling and aggregation to recalibrate the modality features for video sentiment and emotion prediction. GCM-Net includes a cross-modal attention module determining intermodal interactions and utterance relevance. A harmonic optimization module employing a metaheuristic algorithm combines attended features, allowing for handling both single and multi-utterance inputs. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted extensive evaluations on three prominent multi-modal benchmark datasets, CMU MOSI, CMU MOSEI, and IEMOCAP. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach, showcasing accuracies of 91.56% and 86.95% for sentiment analysis on MOSI and MOSEI datasets. We have performed emotion analysis for the IEMOCAP dataset procuring an accuracy of 85.66% which signifies substantial performance enhancements over existing methods.
For privacy-preserving graph learning tasks involving distributed graph datasets, federated learning (FL)-based GCN (FedGCN) training is required. A key challenge for FedGCN is scaling to large-scale graphs, which typically incurs high computation and communication costs when dealing with the explosively increasing number of neighbors. Existing graph sampling-enhanced FedGCN training approaches ignore graph structural information or dynamics of optimization, resulting in high variance and inaccurate node embeddings. To address this limitation, we propose the Federated Adaptive Importance-based Sampling (FedAIS) approach. It achieves substantial computational cost saving by focusing the limited resources on training important nodes, while reducing communication overhead via adaptive historical embedding synchronization. The proposed adaptive importance-based sampling method jointly considers the graph structural heterogeneity and the optimization dynamics to achieve optimal trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. Extensive evaluations against five state-of-the-art baselines on five real-world graph datasets show that FedAIS achieves comparable or up to 3.23% higher test accuracy, while saving communication and computation costs by 91.77% and 85.59%.
Temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) outperform regular GNNs by incorporating time information into graph-based operations. However, TGNNs adopt specialized models (e.g., TGN, TGAT, and APAN ) and require tailored training frameworks (e.g., TGL and ETC). In this paper, we propose TF-TGN, which uses Transformer decoder as the backbone model for TGNN to enjoy Transformer's codebase for efficient training. In particular, Transformer achieves tremendous success for language modeling, and thus the community developed high-performance kernels (e.g., flash-attention and memory-efficient attention) and efficient distributed training schemes (e.g., PyTorch FSDP, DeepSpeed, and Megatron-LM). We observe that TGNN resembles language modeling, i.e., the message aggregation operation between chronologically occurring nodes and their temporal neighbors in TGNNs can be structured as sequence modeling. Beside this similarity, we also incorporate a series of algorithm designs including suffix infilling, temporal graph attention with self-loop, and causal masking self-attention to make TF-TGN work. During training, existing systems are slow in transforming the graph topology and conducting graph sampling. As such, we propose methods to parallelize the CSR format conversion and graph sampling. We also adapt Transformer codebase to train TF-TGN efficiently with multiple GPUs. We experiment with 9 graphs and compare with 2 state-of-the-art TGNN training frameworks. The results show that TF-TGN can accelerate training by over 2.20 while providing comparable or even superior accuracy to existing SOTA TGNNs. TF-TGN is available at https://github.com/qianghuangwhu/TF-TGN.
Bearing fault diagnosis technology has a wide range of practical applications in industrial production, energy and other fields. Timely and accurate detection of bearing faults plays an important role in preventing catastrophic accidents and ensuring product quality. Traditional signal analysis techniques and deep learning-based fault detection algorithms do not take into account the intricate correlation between signals, making it difficult to further improve detection accuracy. To address this problem, we introduced Graph Sampling and Aggregation (GraphSAGE) network and proposed GraphSAGE-based Bearing fault Diagnosis (GSABFD) algorithm. The original vibration signal is firstly sliced through a fixed size non-overlapping sliding window, and the sliced data is feature transformed using signal analysis methods; then correlations are constructed for the transformed vibration signal and further transformed into vertices in the graph; then the GraphSAGE network is used for training; finally the fault level of the object is calculated in the output layer of the network. The proposed algorithm is compared with five advanced algorithms in a real-world public dataset for experiments, and the results show that the GSABFD algorithm improves the AUC value by 5% compared with the next best algorithm.
The public sharing of user information opens the door for adversaries to infer private data, leading to privacy breaches and facilitating malicious activities. While numerous studies have concentrated on privacy leakage via public user attributes, the threats associated with the exposure of user relationships, particularly through network structure, are often neglected. This study aims to fill this critical gap by advancing the understanding and protection against privacy risks emanating from network structure, moving beyond direct connections with neighbors to include the broader implications of indirect network structural patterns. To achieve this, we first investigate the problem of Graph Privacy Leakage via Structure (GPS), and introduce a novel measure, the Generalized Homophily Ratio, to quantify the various mechanisms contributing to privacy breach risks in GPS. Based on this insight, we develop a novel graph private attribute inference attack, which acts as a pivotal tool for evaluating the potential for privacy leakage through network structures under worst-case scenarios. To protect users' private data from such vulnerabilities, we propose a graph data publishing method incorporating a learnable graph sampling technique, effectively transforming the original graph into a privacy-preserving version. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our attack model poses a significant threat to user privacy, and our graph data publishing method successfully achieves the optimal privacy-utility trade-off compared to baselines.
Finding important edges in a graph is a crucial problem for various research fields, such as network epidemics, signal processing, machine learning, and sensor networks. In this paper, we tackle the problem based on sampling theory on graphs. We convert the original graph to a line graph where its nodes and edges, respectively, represent the original edges and the connections between the edges. We then perform node sampling of the line graph based on the edge smoothness assumption: This process selects the most critical edges in the original graph. We present a general framework of edge sampling based on graph sampling theory and reveal a theoretical relationship between the degree of the original graph and the line graph. We also propose an acceleration method for edge sampling in the proposed framework by using the relationship between two types of Laplacian of the node and edge domains. Experimental results in synthetic and real-world graphs validate the effectiveness of our approach against some alternative edge selection methods.
Click-through-rate (CTR) prediction has an essential impact on improving user experience and revenue in e-commerce search. With the development of deep learning, graph-based methods are well exploited to utilize graph structure extracted from user behaviors and other information to help embedding learning. However, most of the previous graph-based methods mainly focus on recommendation scenarios, and therefore their graph structures highly depend on item's sequential information from user behaviors, ignoring query's sequential signal and query-item correlation. In this paper, we propose a new approach named Light-weight End-to-End Graph Interest Network (EGIN) to effectively mine users' search interests and tackle previous challenges. (i) EGIN utilizes query and item's correlation and sequential information from the search system to build a heterogeneous graph for better CTR prediction in e-commerce search. (ii) EGIN's graph embedding learning shares the same training input and is jointly trained with CTR prediction, making the end-to-end framework effortless to deploy in large-scale search systems. The proposed EGIN is composed of three parts: query-item heterogeneous graph, light-weight graph sampling, and multi-interest network. The query-item heterogeneous graph captures correlation and sequential information of query and item efficiently by the proposed light-weight graph sampling. The multi-interest network is well designed to utilize graph embedding to capture various similarity relationships between query and item to enhance the final CTR prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EGIN. At the same time, the training cost of graph learning is relatively low compared with the main CTR prediction task, ensuring efficiency in practical applications.
We propose AGS-GNN, a novel attribute-guided sampling algorithm for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that exploits node features and connectivity structure of a graph while simultaneously adapting for both homophily and heterophily in graphs. (In homophilic graphs vertices of the same class are more likely to be connected, and vertices of different classes tend to be linked in heterophilic graphs.) While GNNs have been successfully applied to homophilic graphs, their application to heterophilic graphs remains challenging. The best-performing GNNs for heterophilic graphs do not fit the sampling paradigm, suffer high computational costs, and are not inductive. We employ samplers based on feature-similarity and feature-diversity to select subsets of neighbors for a node, and adaptively capture information from homophilic and heterophilic neighborhoods using dual channels. Currently, AGS-GNN is the only algorithm that we know of that explicitly controls homophily in the sampled subgraph through similar and diverse neighborhood samples. For diverse neighborhood sampling, we employ submodularity, which was not used in this context prior to our work. The sampling distribution is pre-computed and highly parallel, achieving the desired scalability. Using an extensive dataset consisting of 35 small ($\le$ 100K nodes) and large (>100K nodes) homophilic and heterophilic graphs, we demonstrate the superiority of AGS-GNN compare to the current approaches in the literature. AGS-GNN achieves comparable test accuracy to the best-performing heterophilic GNNs, even outperforming methods using the entire graph for node classification. AGS-GNN also converges faster compared to methods that sample neighborhoods randomly, and can be incorporated into existing GNN models that employ node or graph sampling.