## Implicit SVD for Graph Representation Learning

May 21, 2021 (edited Oct 27, 2021)NeurIPS 2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
• Keywords: SVD, symbolic matrix, fast, graph, GRL, gradient-free, embedding, splitrelu, convex-nonconvex, resource efficient training, semi-supervised node classification
• TL;DR: Framework for representing matrices symbolically and efficiently computing their SVD, training graph networks orders-of-magnitude than SOTA, yet shows competitive empirical test performance
• Abstract: Recent improvements in the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for Graph Representational Learning (GRL) have come at the cost of significant computational resource requirements for training, e.g., for calculating gradients via backprop over many data epochs. Meanwhile, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) can find closed-form solutions to convex problems, using merely a handful of epochs. In this paper, we make GRL more computationally tractable for those with modest hardware. We design a framework that computes SVD of *implicitly* defined matrices, and apply this framework to several GRL tasks. For each task, we derive first-order approximation of a SOTA model, where we design (expensive-to-store) matrix $\mathbf{M}$ and train the model, in closed-form, via SVD of $\mathbf{M}$, without calculating entries of $\mathbf{M}$. By converging to a unique point in one step, and without calculating gradients, our models show competitive empirical test performance over various graphs such as article citation and biological interaction networks. More importantly, SVD can initialize a deeper model, that is architected to be non-linear almost everywhere, though behaves linearly when its parameters reside on a hyperplane, onto which SVD initializes. The deeper model can then be fine-tuned within only a few epochs. Overall, our algorithm trains hundreds of times faster than state-of-the-art methods, while competing on test empirical performance. We open-source our implementation at: https://github.com/samihaija/isvd
• Supplementary Material: pdf
• Code Of Conduct: I certify that all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the NeurIPS Statement on Ethics, Fairness, Inclusivity, and Code of Conduct.
• Code: https://github.com/samihaija/isvd
10 Replies