LINGUINE: LearnIng to pruNe on subGraph convolUtIon NEtworks

Yihan He, Wei Cao, Shun Zheng, Zhifeng Gao, Jiang Bian

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks, Meta-Learning, Pruning

Abstract: Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has become one of the most successful methods for graph representation learning. Training and evaluating GCNs on large graphs is challenging since full-batch GCNs have high overhead in memory and computation. In recent years, research communities have been developing stochastic sampling methods to handle large graphs when it is unreal to put the whole graph into a single batch. The performance of the model depends largely on the quality and size of subgraphs in the batch-training. Existing sampling approaches mostly focus on approximating the full-graph structure but care less about redundancy and randomness in sampling subgraphs. To address these issues and explore a better mechanism of producing high-quality subgraphs to train GCNs, we proposed the \texttt{Linguine} framework where we designed a meta-model to prune the subgraph smartly. To efficiently obtain the meta-model, we designed a joint training scenario with the idea of hardness based learning. The empirical study shows that our method could augment the accuracy of the current state-of-art and reduce the error incurred by the redundancies in the subgraph structure. We also explored the reasoning behind smart pruning via its visualization.

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