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Poster
VQ-GNN: A Universal Framework to Scale up Graph Neural Networks using Vector Quantization
Mucong Ding · Kezhi Kong · Jingling Li · Chen Zhu · John Dickerson · Furong Huang · Tom Goldstein

Thu Dec 09 04:30 PM -- 06:00 PM (PST) @ Virtual

Most state-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can be defined as a form of graph convolution which can be realized by message passing between direct neighbors or beyond. To scale such GNNs to large graphs, various neighbor-, layer-, or subgraph-sampling techniques are proposed to alleviate the "neighbor explosion" problem by considering only a small subset of messages passed to the nodes in a mini-batch. However, sampling-based methods are difficult to apply to GNNs that utilize many-hops-away or global context each layer, show unstable performance for different tasks and datasets, and do not speed up model inference. We propose a principled and fundamentally different approach, VQ-GNN, a universal framework to scale up any convolution-based GNNs using Vector Quantization (VQ) without compromising the performance. In contrast to sampling-based techniques, our approach can effectively preserve all the messages passed to a mini-batch of nodes by learning and updating a small number of quantized reference vectors of global node representations, using VQ within each GNN layer. Our framework avoids the "neighbor explosion" problem of GNNs using quantized representations combined with a low-rank version of the graph convolution matrix. We show that such a compact low-rank version of the gigantic convolution matrix is sufficient both theoretically and experimentally. In company with VQ, we design a novel approximated message passing algorithm and a nontrivial back-propagation rule for our framework. Experiments on various types of GNN backbones demonstrate the scalability and competitive performance of our framework on large-graph node classification and link prediction benchmarks.

Author Information

Mucong Ding (Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park)
Kezhi Kong (University of Maryland, College Park)
Jingling Li (University of Maryland, College Park)
Chen Zhu (University of Maryland, College Park)
John Dickerson (University of Maryland)
Furong Huang (University of Maryland)

Furong Huang is an assistant professor of computer science. Huang’s research focuses on machine learning, high-dimensional statistics and distributed algorithms—both the theoretical analysis and practical implementation of parallel spectral methods for latent variable graphical models. Some applications of her research include developing fast detection algorithms to discover hidden and overlapping user communities in social networks, learning convolutional sparse coding models for understanding semantic meanings of sentences and object recognition in images, healthcare analytics by learning a hierarchy on human diseases for guiding doctors to identify potential diseases afflicting patients, and more. Huang recently completed a postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research in New York.

Tom Goldstein (Rice University)

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