Kernel Readout for Graph Neural Networks

Kernel Readout for Graph Neural Networks

Jiajun Yu, Zhihao Wu, Jinyu Cai, Adele Lu Jia, Jicong Fan

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2505-2514. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/277

Graph neural networks (GNNs) for graph classification or representation learning require a pooling operation to convert the nodes' embeddings of each graph to a vector as the graph-level representation and the operation has a significant impact on model accuracy. The paper presents a novel graph pooling method called Kernel Readout (KerRead). KerRead maps the node embeddings from the sample space with limited nodes to an augmented sample space with infinite nodes, and then calculates the inner product between some learnable adaptive centers and the augmented node embeddings, which forms a final graph-level feature vector. We apply the proposed strategy to six supervised and two unsupervised graph neural networks such as GCN, GIN, GUNet, InfoGraph, and GraphCL, and the experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that the proposed readout outperforms classical pooling methods such as Sum and seven state-of-the-art pooling methods such as SRead and Janossy GRU. Code and Appendix are both available at https://github.com/jiajunCAU/KerRead.
Keywords:
Data Mining: DM: Mining graphs
Machine Learning: ML: Representation learning