Learning Long Range Dependencies on Graphs via Random Walks

Dexiong Chen, Till Hendrik Schulz, Karsten Borgwardt

Keywords: Graph neural networks, Graph transformers, Random walks, Long-range dependencies

TL;DR: A novel random-walk based neural architecture for graph representation learning

Abstract:

Message-passing graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at capturing local relationships but struggle with long-range dependencies in graphs. In contrast, graph transformers (GTs) enable global information exchange but often oversimplify the graph structure by representing graphs as sets of fixed-length vectors. This work introduces a novel architecture that overcomes the shortcomings of both approaches by combining the long-range information of random walks with local message passing. By treating random walks as sequences, our architecture leverages recent advances in sequence models to effectively capture long-range dependencies within these walks. Based on this concept, we propose a framework that offers (1) more expressive graph representations through random walk sequences, (2) the ability to utilize any sequence model for capturing long-range dependencies, and (3) the flexibility by integrating various GNN and GT architectures. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance on 19 graph and node benchmark datasets, notably outperforming existing methods by up to 13\% on the PascalVoc-SP and COCO-SP datasets.
Code: https://github.com/BorgwardtLab/NeuralWalker

Primary Area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies

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Submission Number: 7025