A Topology-aware Graph Coarsening Framework for Continual Graph Learning

Xiaoxue Han, Zhuo Feng, Yue Ning

Keywords: Continual Graph Learning, Catastrophic Forgetting, Graph Coarsening

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) experience "catastrophic forgetting" in continual learning setups, where they tend to lose previously acquired knowledge and perform poorly on old tasks. Rehearsal-based methods, which consolidate old knowledge with a replay memory buffer, are a de facto solution due to their straightforward workflow. However, these methods often fail to adequately capture topological information, leading to incorrect input-label mappings in replay samples. To address this, we propose TACO, a topology-aware graph coarsening and continual learning framework that stores information from previous tasks as a reduced graph. Throughout each learning period, this reduced graph expands by integrating with a new graph and aligning shared nodes, followed by a "zoom-out" reduction process to maintain a stable size. We have developed a graph coarsening algorithm based on node representation proximities to efficiently reduce a graph while preserving essential topological information. We empirically demonstrate that the learning process on the reduced graph can closely approximate that on the original graph. We compare TACO with a wide range of state-of-the-art baselines, proving its superiority and the necessity of preserving high-quality topological information for effective replaying.

Primary Area: Graph neural networks

Submission Number: 12395