AdaGMLP: AdaBoosting GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have revolutionized graph-based machine learning, but their heavy computational demands pose challenges for latency-sensitive edge devices in practical industrial applications. In response, a new wave of methods, collectively known as GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation, has emerged. They aim to transfer GNN-learned knowledge to a more efficient MLP student, which offers faster, resource-efficient inference while maintaining competitive performance compared to GNNs. However, these methods face significant challenges in situations with insufficient training data and incomplete test data, limiting their applicability in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose AdaGMLP, an AdaBoosting GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation framework. It leverages an ensemble of diverse MLP students trained on different subsets of labeled nodes, addressing the issue of insufficient training data. Additionally, it incorporates a Node Alignment technique for robust predictions on test data with missing or incomplete features. Our experiments on seven benchmark datasets with different settings demonstrate that AdaGMLP outperforms existing G2M methods, making it suitable for a wide range of latency-sensitive real-world applications. We have submitted our code to the GitHub repository (https://github.com/WeigangLu/AdaGMLP-KDD24).

NodeMixup: Tackling Under-Reaching for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become mainstream methods for solving the semi-supervised node classification problem. However, due to the uneven location distribution of labeled nodes in the graph, labeled nodes are only accessible to a small portion of unlabeled nodes, leading to the \emph{under-reaching} issue. In this study, we firstly reveal under-reaching by conducting an empirical investigation on various well-known graphs. Then, we demonstrate that under-reaching results in unsatisfactory distribution alignment between labeled and unlabeled nodes through systematic experimental analysis, significantly degrading GNNs' performance. To tackle under-reaching for GNNs, we propose an architecture-agnostic method dubbed NodeMixup. The fundamental idea is to (1) increase the reachability of labeled nodes by labeled-unlabeled pairs mixup, (2) leverage graph structures via fusing the neighbor connections of intra-class node pairs to improve performance gains of mixup, and (3) use neighbor label distribution similarity incorporating node degrees to determine sampling weights for node mixup. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of NodeMixup in assisting GNNs in handling under-reaching. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/WeigangLu/NodeMixup}.

Pseudo Contrastive Learning for Graph-based Semi-supervised Learning

Pseudo Labeling is a technique used to improve the performance of semi-supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by generating additional pseudo-labels based on confident predictions. However, the quality of generated pseudo-labels has long been a concern due to the sensitivity of the classification objective to given labels. To avoid the untrustworthy classification supervision indicating ``a node belongs to a specific class,'' we favor the fault-tolerant contrasting supervision demonstrating ``two nodes do not belong to the same class.'' Thus, the problem of generating high-quality pseudo-labels is then transformed into a relaxed version, i.e., finding reliable contrasting pairs. To achieve this, we propose a general framework for GNNs, termed Pseudo Contrastive Learning (PCL). It separates two nodes whose positive and negative pseudo-labels target the same class. To incorporate topological knowledge into learning, we devise a topologically weighted contrastive loss that spends more effort separating negative pairs with smaller topological distances. Additionally, to alleviate the heavy reliance on data augmentation, we augment nodes only by applying dropout to the encoded representations. Theoretically, we prove that PCL with the lightweight augmentation works like a representation regularizer to effectively learn separation between negative pairs. Experimentally, we employ PCL on various models, which consistently outperform their counterparts using other popular general techniques on five real-world graphs.

Self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Pre-training Based on Structural Clustering

Recent self-supervised pre-training methods on Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs) have shown promising competitiveness over traditional semi-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs). Unfortunately, their performance heavily depends on careful customization of various strategies for generating high-quality positive examples and negative examples, which notably limits their flexibility and generalization ability. In this work, we present SHGP, a novel Self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Pre-training approach, which does not need to generate any positive examples or negative examples. It consists of two modules that share the same attention-aggregation scheme. In each iteration, the Att-LPA module produces pseudo-labels through structural clustering, which serve as the self-supervision signals to guide the Att-HGNN module to learn object embeddings and attention coefficients. The two modules can effectively utilize and enhance each other, promoting the model to learn discriminative embeddings. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness of SHGP against state-of-the-art unsupervised baselines and even semi-supervised baselines. We release our source code at: https://github.com/kepsail/SHGP.

An Improved Normed-Deformable Convolution for Crowd Counting

In recent years, crowd counting has become an important issue in computer vision. In most methods, the density maps are generated by convolving with a Gaussian kernel from the ground-truth dot maps which are marked around the center of human heads. Due to the fixed geometric structures in CNNs and indistinct head-scale information, the head features are obtained incompletely. Deformable convolution is proposed to exploit the scale-adaptive capabilities for CNN features in the heads. By learning the coordinate offsets of the sampling points, it is tractable to improve the ability to adjust the receptive field. However, the heads are not uniformly covered by the sampling points in the deformable convolution, resulting in loss of head information. To handle the non-uniformed sampling, an improved Normed-Deformable Convolution (\textit{i.e.,}NDConv) implemented by Normed-Deformable loss (\textit{i.e.,}NDloss) is proposed in this paper. The offsets of the sampling points which are constrained by NDloss tend to be more even. Then, the features in the heads are obtained more completely, leading to better performance. Especially, the proposed NDConv is a light-weight module which shares similar computation burden with Deformable Convolution. In the extensive experiments, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ShanghaiTech A, ShanghaiTech B, UCF\_QNRF, and UCF\_CC\_50 dataset, achieving 61.4, 7.8, 91.2, and 167.2 MAE, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/bingshuangzhuzi/NDConv

SkipNode: On Alleviating Over-smoothing for Deep Graph Convolutional Networks

Over-smoothing is a challenging problem, which degrades the performance of deep graph convolutional networks (GCNs). However, existing studies for alleviating the over-smoothing problem lack either generality or effectiveness. In this paper, we analyze the underlying issues behind the over-smoothing problem, i.e., feature-diversity degeneration, gradient vanishing, and model weights over-decaying. Inspired by this, we propose a simple yet effective plug-and-play module, SkipNode, to alleviate over-smoothing. Specifically, for each middle layer of a GCN model, SkipNode randomly (or based on node degree) selects nodes to skip the convolutional operation by directly feeding their input features to the nonlinear function. Analytically, 1) skipping the convolutional operation prevents the features from losing diversity; and 2) the "skipped" nodes enable gradients to be directly passed back, thus mitigating the gradient vanishing and model weights over-decaying issues. To demonstrate the superiority of SkipNode, we conduct extensive experiments on nine popular datasets, including both homophilic and heterophilic graphs, with different graph sizes on two typical tasks: node classification and link prediction. Specifically, 1) SkipNode has strong generalizability of being applied to various GCN-based models on different datasets and tasks; and 2) SkipNode outperforms recent state-of-the-art anti-over-smoothing plug-and-play modules, i.e., DropEdge and DropNode, in different settings. Code will be made publicly available on GitHub.