PromptGCN: Bridging Subgraph Gaps in Lightweight GCNs

Shengwei Ji, Yujie Tian, Fei Liu, Xinlu Li, Le Wu

Abstract: Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are widely used in graph-based applications, such as social networks and recommendation systems. Nevertheless, large-scale graphs or deep aggregation layers in full-batch GCNs consume significant GPU memory, causing out-of-memory (OOM) errors on mainstream GPUs (e.g., 29-GB memory consumption on the Ogbn-products graph with five layers). The subgraph sampling methods reduce memory consumption to achieve lightweight GCNs by partitioning the graph into multiple subgraphs and sequentially training GCNs on each subgraph. However, these methods yield gaps among subgraphs, i.e., GCNs can only be trained based on subgraphs instead of global graph information, which reduces the accuracy of GCNs. In this article, we propose PromptGCN, a novel prompt-based lightweight GCN model to bridge the gaps among subgraphs. First, the learnable prompt embeddings are designed to obtain global information. Then, the prompts are attached to each subgraph to transfer the global information among subgraphs. Extensive experimental results on seven large-scale graphs demonstrate that PromptGCN exhibits superior performance compared to baselines. Notably, PromptGCN improves the accuracy of subgraph sampling methods by up to 5.48% on the Flickr dataset. Overall, PromptGCN is easily integrable with any subgraph sampling method to obtain a lightweight GCN model with higher accuracy.

External IDs:doi:10.1109/tnnls.2026.3654995