HOPE: High-order Graph ODE For Modeling Interacting Dynamics
Authors: Xiao Luo, Jingyang Yuan, Zijie Huang, Huiyu Jiang, Yifang Qin, Wei Ju, Ming Zhang, Yizhou Sun

Leading graph ordinary differential equation (ODE) models have offered generalized strategies to model interacting multi-agent dynamical systems in a data-driven approach. They typically consist of a temporal graph encoder to get the initial states and a neural ODE-based generative model to model the evolution of dynamical systems. However, existing methods have severe deficiencies in capacity and efficiency due to the failure to model high-order correlations in long-term temporal trends. To tackle this, in this paper, we propose a novel model named High-order graph ODE (HOPE) for learning from dynamic interaction data, which can be naturally represented as a graph. It first adopts a twin graph encoder to initialize the latent state representations of nodes and edges, which consists of two branches to capture spatio-temporal correlations in complementary manners. More importantly, our HOPE utilizes a second-order graph ODE function which models the dynamics for both nodes and edges in the latent space respectively, which enables efficient learning of long-term dependencies from complex dynamical systems. Experiment results on a variety of datasets demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.