Intrusion-Free Graph Mixup

Hongyu Guo, Yongyi Mao

Keywords: graph augmentation, Mixup, graph classification, graph neural networks

Abstract: We present a simple and yet effective interpolation-based regularization technique to improve the generalization of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). We leverage the recent advances in Mixup regularizer for vision and text, where random sample pairs and their labels are interpolated to create synthetic samples for training. Unlike images or natural sentences, which embrace a grid or linear sequence format, graphs have arbitrary structure and topology, which play a vital role on the semantic information of a graph. Consequently, even simply deleting or adding one edge from a graph can dramatically change its semantic meanings. This makes interpolating graph inputs very challenging because mixing random graph pairs may naturally create graphs with identical structure but with different labels, causing the manifold intrusion issue. To cope with this obstacle, we propose the first input mixing schema for Mixup on graph. We theoretically prove that our mixing strategy can recover the source graphs from the mixed graph, and guarantees that the mixed graphs are manifold intrusion free. We also empirically show that our method can effectively regularize the graph classification learning, resulting in superior predictive accuracy over popular graph augmentation baselines.

One-sentence Summary: We propose the first input mixing schema for Mixup on graph, with theoretical guarantee of manifold intrusion free.

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2110.09344/code)