LightDiC: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Large-scale Digraph Representation Learning

Most existing graph neural networks (GNNs) are limited to undirected graphs, whose restricted scope of the captured relational information hinders their expressive capabilities and deployments in real-world scenarios. Compared with undirected graphs, directed graphs (digraphs) fit the demand for modeling more complex topological systems by capturing more intricate relationships between nodes, such as formulating transportation and financial networks. While some directed GNNs have been introduced, their inspiration mainly comes from deep learning architectures, which lead to redundant complexity and computation, making them inapplicable to large-scale databases. To address these issues, we propose LightDiC, a scalable variant of the digraph convolution based on the magnetic Laplacian. Since topology-related computations are conducted solely during offline pre-processing, LightDiC achieves exceptional scalability, enabling downstream predictions to be trained separately without incurring recursive computational costs. Theoretical analysis shows that LightDiC utilizes directed information to achieve message passing based on the complex field, which corresponds to the proximal gradient descent process of the Dirichlet energy optimization function from the perspective of digraph signal denoising, ensuring its expressiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that LightDiC performs comparably well or even outperforms other SOTA methods in various downstream tasks, with fewer learnable parameters and higher training efficiency. Notably, LightDiC is the first DiGNN to provide satisfactory results in the most representative large-scale database (ogbn-papers100M).

Locally Differentially Private Graph Embedding

Graph embedding has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for learning latent representations for nodes in a graph. However, despite its superior performance in various graph-based machine learning tasks, learning over graphs can raise significant privacy concerns when graph data involves sensitive information. To address this, in this paper, we investigate the problem of developing graph embedding algorithms that satisfy local differential privacy (LDP). We propose LDP-GE, a novel privacy-preserving graph embedding framework, to protect the privacy of node data. Specifically, we propose an LDP mechanism to obfuscate node data and adopt personalized PageRank as the proximity measure to learn node representations. Then, we theoretically analyze the privacy guarantees and utility of the LDP-GE framework. Extensive experiments conducted over several real-world graph datasets demonstrate that LDP-GE achieves favorable privacy-utility trade-offs and significantly outperforms existing approaches in both node classification and link prediction tasks.