From GNNs to Sparse Transformers: Graph-Based Architectures for Multi-hop Question Answering

Shane Acton, Jan Buys

Abstract: Sparse Transformers have surpassed Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as the state-of-the-art architecture for multi-hop question answering (MHQA). Noting that the Transformer is a particular message passing GNN, in this paper we perform an architectural analysis and evaluation to investigate why the Transformer outperforms other GNNs on MHQA. We simplify existing GNN-based MHQA models and leverage this system to compare GNN architectures in a lower compute setting than token-level models. Our results support the superiority of the Transformer architecture as a GNN in MHQA. We also investigate the role of graph sparsity, graph structure, and edge features in our GNNs. We find that task-specific graph structuring rules outperform the random connections used in Sparse Transformers. We also show that utilising edge type information alleviates performance losses introduced by sparsity.