Are More Layers Beneficial to Graph Transformers?Download PDF

Published: 01 Feb 2023, Last Modified: 12 Mar 2024ICLR 2023 posterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Transformer, Graph Representation, Depth
Abstract: Despite that going deep has proven successful in many neural architectures, the existing graph transformers are relatively shallow. In this work, we explore whether more layers are beneficial to graph transformers, and find that current graph transformers suffer from the bottleneck of improving performance by increasing depth. Our further analysis reveals the reason is that deep graph transformers are limited by the vanishing capacity of global attention, restricting the graph transformer from focusing on the critical substructure and obtaining expressive features. To this end, we propose a novel graph transformer model named DeepGraph that explicitly employs substructure tokens in the encoded representation, and applies local attention on related nodes to obtain substructure based attention encoding. Our model enhances the ability of the global attention to focus on substructures and promotes the expressiveness of the representations, addressing the limitation of self-attention as the graph transformer deepens. Experiments show that our method unblocks the depth limitation of graph transformers and results in state-of-the-art performance across various graph benchmarks with deeper models.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors’ identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics
Submission Guidelines: Yes
Please Choose The Closest Area That Your Submission Falls Into: Deep Learning and representational learning
TL;DR: We analyze and solve the depth bottleneck of graph transformers from the perspective of attention capacity.
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2303.00579/code)
17 Replies

Loading