Title: ATTENTION-BASED GRAPH NEURAL NETWORK FOR SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING Anonymous

Abstract: Recently popularized graph neural networks achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy on a number of standard benchmark datasets for graph-based semi-supervised learning, improving significantly over existing approaches. These architectures alternate between a propagation layer that aggregates the hidden states of the local neighborhood and a fully-connected layer. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that a linear model, that removes all the intermediate fully-connected layers, is still able to achieve a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art models. This significantly reduces the number of parameters, which is critical for semi-supervised learning where number of labeled examples are small. This in turn allows a room for designing more innovative propagation layers. Based on this insight, we propose a novel graph neural network that removes all the intermediate fullyconnected layers, and replaces the propagation layers with attention mechanisms that respect the structure of the graph. The attention mechanism allows us to learn a dynamic and adaptive local summary of the neighborhood to achieve more accurate predictions. In a number of experiments on benchmark citation networks datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms competing methods. By examining the attention weights among neighbors, we show that our model provides some interesting insights on how neighbors influence each other.

1. INTRODUCTION:

One of the major bottlenecks in applying machine learning in practice is collecting sizable and reliable labeled data, essential for accurate predictions. One way to overcome the problem of limited labeled data is semi-supervised learning, using additional unlabeled data that might be freely available. In this paper, we are interested in a scenario when this additional unlabeled data is available in a form of a graph. The graph provides underlying pairwise relations among the data points, both labeled and unlabeled.

Of particular interest are those applications where the presence or absence of an edge between two data points is determined by nature, for instance as a result of human activities or natural relations. As a concrete example, consider a citation network. Each node in the graph is a published research paper, associated with a bag-of-words feature vector. An (directed) edge indicates a citation link. Presence of an edge indicates that the authors of a paper have consciously determined to refer to the other paper, and hence captures some underlying relation that might not be inferred from the bag-of-words feature vectors alone. Such external graph data are available in several applications of interest, such as classifying users connected via a social network, items and customers connected by purchase history, users and movies connected by viewing history, and entities in a knowledge graph connected by relationships. In this paper, we are interested in the setting where the graph is explicitly given and represents additional information not present in the feature vectors.

The goal of such graph-based semi-supervised learning problems is to classify the nodes in a graph using a small subset of labeled nodes and all the node features. There is a long line of literature on this topic since Blum & Chawla (2001) which seeks graph cuts that preserve the known labels and Zhu et al. (2003) which uses graph Laplacian to regularize the nearby nodes to have similar labels. However, Kipf & Welling (2016) recently demonstrated that the existing approaches can be significantly improved upon on a number of standard benchmark datasets, using an innovative neural network architecture on graph-based data known collectively as graph neural networks.

Inspired by this success, we seek to understand the reason behind the power of graph neural networks, to guide our design of a novel architecture for semi-supervised learning on graphs. To this end, we first found that a linear classifier of multinomial logistic regression achieves the accuracy comparable to the best known graph neural network. This linear classifier removes all intermediate non-linear activation layers, and only keeps the linear propagation function from neighbors in graph neural networks. This suggests the importance of aggregation information form the neighbors in the graph. This further motivates us to design a new way of aggregating neighborhood information through attention mechanism since, intuitively, neighbors might not be equally important. This proposed attention-based graph neural network captures this intuition and (a) greatly reduces the model complexity, with only a single scalar parameter at each intermediate layer; (b) discovers dynamically and adaptively which nodes are relevant to the target node for classification; and (c) improves upon state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy on standard benchmark datasets. Further, the learned attention strengths provide some form of interpretability. They provide insights on why a particular prediction is made on a target node and which neighbors are more relevant in making that decision.

2. RELATED WORK:

Given a graph G(V, E) with a set of n nodes V and a set of edges E, we let X i ∈ R dx denote the feature vector at node i and let Y i denote the true label. We use Y L to denote the labels that are revealed to us for a subset L ⊂ V . We let X = [X 1 , . . . , X n ] denote all features, labeled and unlabeled.

Traditionally, semi-supervised learning using both labeled and un-labled data has been solved using two different approaches -Graph Laplacian based algorithms solving for locally consistent solutions (Zhou et al., 2004b) and Expectation Maximization based algorithms (Nigam et al., 2006) where true-labels of the unlabeled data points are considered as the latent variables of a generative model.

Graph Laplacian regularization.:

Based on the assumption that nearby nodes in a graph are more likely to have the same labels, the graph information has been used as explicit regularization:

L(X, Y L ) = L label (X L , Y L ) + λ L G (X) ,

where L label = i∈L l(Y i , f (X i )) is the standard supervised loss for some loss functions l and L G is the graph-based regularization, for example L G = (i,j)∈E f (X i ) -f (X j ) 2 , which is called the graph Laplacian regularization. Earlier approaches are non-parametric and searches over all f considering it as a look-up table. Most popular one is the Label Propagation (Zhu & Ghahramani, 2002) that forces the estimated labels to agree in the labeled instances and uses weighted graph Laplacian. This innovative formulation admits a closed form solution which makes it practically attractive with very low computationally cost. ManiReg (Belkin et al., 2006) replaces supervised loss with that of a support vector machine. ICA (Lu & Getoor, 2003) generalizes LP by allowing more general local updates. A more thorough survey on using non-neural network methods for semi-supervised learning can be found in (Chapelle et al., 2009) .

More recent approaches are parametric, using deep neural networks. SemiEmb (Weston et al., 2012) was the first to use a deep neural network to model f (x) and minimize the above loss. Planetoid (Yang et al., 2016) significantly improves upon the existing graph regularization approaches by replacing the regularization by another loss based on skip-grams (defined below). In a slightly different context, Buchnik & Cohen (2017) show that the accuracy of these approaches can be further improved by bootstrapping these models sequentially.

Unsupervised node embedding for semi-supervised learning. Several approaches have been proposed to embed the nodes in some latent Euclidean space using only the connectivity in graph G. Once the embedding is learned, standard supervised learning is applied on those embedded features to train a model. Inspired by the success of word2vec (Le & Mikolov, 2014) , several approaches define "skip-grams" on graphs as the neighborhood (context) of a node on the graph and tries to maximize the posterior probability of observing those skip-grams. DeepWalk (Perozzi et al., 2014) and node2vec (Grover & Leskovec, 2016) use random walks as skip-grams, LINE (Tang et al., 2015) uses local proximities, LASAGNE (Faerman et al., 2017) uses the Personalized PageRank random walk. Graph2Gauss (A. Bojchevski, 2017) represents a node as a Gaussian distribution, and minimizes the divergence between connected pairs. Yang et al. (2017) provide a post-processing scheme that takes any node embedding and attempts to improve it by by taking the weighted sum of the given embeddings with Personalized PageRank weights. The strength of these approaches is universality, as the node embedding does not depend on the particular task at hand (and in particular the features or the labels). However, as they do not use the node features and the training only happens after embedding, they cannot meet the performance of the state-of-the-art approaches (see DeepWalk in Table 2 ).

Graph Neural Network (GNN). Graph neural networks are extensions of neural networks to structured data encoded as a graph. Originally introduced as extensions of recurrent neural networks, GNNs apply recurrent layers to each node with additional local averaging layer (Gori et al., 2005; Scarselli et al., 2009) . However, as the weights are shared across all nodes, GNNs can also be interpreted as extensions of convolutional neural networks on a 2D grid to general graphs. Typically, a message aggregation step followed by some neural network architecture is iteratively applied. The model parameters are trained on (semi-)supervised examples with labels. We give a typical example of a GNN in Section 3, but several diverse variations have been proposed in (Bruna et al., 2013; Duvenaud et al., 2015; Li et al., 2015; Henaff et al., 2015; Sukhbaatar et al., 2016; Bronstein et al., 2016; Defferrard et al., 2016; Dai et al., 2016; Atwood & Towsley, 2016; Niepert et al., 2016; Such et al., 2017; Hamilton et al., 2017; Schlichtkrull et al., 2017; Such et al., 2017) . GNNs have been successfully applied in diverse applications such as molecular activation prediction (Gilmer et al., 2017) , community detection (Bruna & Li, 2017 ), matrix completion (Berg et al., 2017) , combinatorial optimization (Dai et al., 2017; Nowak et al., 2017) , and detecting similar binary codes (Xu et al., 2017) .

In particular, for the benchmark datasets that we consider in this paper, Kipf & Welling (2016) proposed a simple but powerful architecture called Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) that achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy. In the following section, (a) we show that the performance of GCN can be met by a linear classifier; and (b) use this insight to introduce novel graph neural networks that compare favourably against the state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets.

3. DISSECTION OF GRAPH NEURAL NETWORK:

In this section, we propose a novel Graph Neural Network (GNN) model which we call Attentionbased Graph Neural Network (AGNN), and compare its performance to state-of-the-art models on benchmark citation networks in Section 5. We seek a model Z = f (X, A) ∈ R n×dy that predicts at each node one of the d y classes. Z ic is the estimated probability that the label at node

i ∈ [n] is c ∈ [d y ]

given the features X and the graph A. The data features X ∈ R n×dx has at each row d x features for each node, and A ∈ {0, 1} n×n is the adjacency matrix of G.

The forward pass in a typical GNN alternates between a propagation layer and a single layer perceptron. Let t be the layer index. We use H (t) ∈ R n×d h to denote the current (hidden) states, with the i-th row H (t) i as the d h dimensional hidden state of node i. A propagation layer with respect to a propagation matrix P ∈ R n×n is defined as

H(t) = P H (t) .

For example, the natural random walk

1 P = D -1 A gives H(t) i = (1/|N (i)|) j∈N (i) H (t)

j . The neighborhood of node i is denoted by N (i), and D = diag(A1). This is a simple local averaging common in consensus or random walk based approaches. Typical propagation layer respects the adjacency pattern in A, performing a variation of such local averaging. GNNs encode the graph structure of A into the model via this propagation layer, which can be also interpreted as performing a graph convolution operation as discussed in Kipf & Welling (2016) . Next, a single layer perceptron is applied on each node separately and the weights W (t) are shared across all the nodes:

H (t+1) = σ( H(t) W (t) ) ,

where W (t) ∈ R d h t+1 ×d h t is the weight matrix and σ(•) is an entry-wise activation function. This weight sharing reduces significantly the number of parameters to be trained, and encodes the invariance property of graph data, i.e. two nodes that are far apart but have the similar neighboring features and structures should be classified similarly. There are several extensions to this model as discussed in the previous section, but this standard graph neural network has proved powerful in several problems over graphs, e.g. (Bruna & Li, 2017; Berg et al., 2017; Dai et al., 2017) .

Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). Kipf & Welling (2016) introduced a simple but powerful architecture, and achieved the state-of-the-art performance in benchmark citation networks (see Table 2 ). GCN is a special case of GNN which stacks two layers of specific propagation and perceptron:

EQUATION

with a choice of P = D-1/2 Ã D-1/2 , where Ã = A+I, I is the identity matrix, D = diag( Ã1) and 1 is the all-ones vector. ReLU(a) = max{0, a} is an entry-wise rectified linear activation function, and softmax([a 1 , . . . ,

a k ]) = (1/Z)[exp(a 1 ), . . . , exp(a k )] with Z = i exp(a i ) is applied row- wise.

Hence, the output is the predicted likelihoods on the d y dimensional probability simplex. The weights W (0) and W (1) are trained to minimize the cross-entropy loss over all labeled examples L:

EQUATION

Graph Linear Network (GLN). To better understand GCN, we remove the intermediate nonlinear activation units from GCN, which gives Graph Linear Network defined as

EQUATION

with the same choice of P = D-1/2 Ã D-1/2 as in GCN. The weights W (0) and W (1) have the same dimensions as GCN and are trained on a cross entropy loss in (2). The two propagation layers simply take (linear) local average of the raw features weighted by their degrees, and at the output layer a simple linear classifier (multinomial logistic regression) is applied. This allows us to separate the gain in the linear propagation layer and the non-linear perceptron layer.

Comparing the differences in performances in Table 2 , we show that, perhaps surprisingly, GLN achieves an accuracy comparable to the that of the best GNN, and sometimes better. This suggests that, for citation networks, the strength of the general GNN architectures is in the propagation layer and not in the perceptron layer. On the other hand, the propagation layers are critical in achieving the desired performance, as is suggested in Table 2 . There are significant gaps in accuracy for those approaches not using the graph, i.e. T-SVM, and also those that use the graph differently, such as Label Propagation (LP) and Planetoid. Based on this observation, we propose replacing the propagation layer of GLN with an attention mechanism and test it on the benchmark datasets.

4. ATTENTION-BASED GRAPH NEURAL NETWORK (AGNN).:

The original propagation layer in GCN and several other graph neural networks such as (Defferrard et al., 2016; Atwood & Towsley, 2016; Monti et al., 2016; Such et al., 2017) use a static (does not change over the layers) and non-adaptive (does not take into account the states of the nodes) propagation, e.g.

P ij = 1/ |N (i)| |N (j)|.

Such propagations are not able to capture which neighbor is more relevant to classifying a target node, which is critical in real data where not all edges imply the same types or strengths of relations.

We need novel dynamic and adaptive propagation layers, capable of capturing the relevance of different edges, which leads to more complex graph neural networks with more parameters. However, training such complex models is challenging in the semi-supervised setting, as the typical number of samples we have for each class is small; it is 20 in the standard benchmark dataset. This is evidenced in Table 2 where more complex graph neural network models by Verma et al. (2017) , Monti et al. (2016), and Such et al. (2017) do not improve upon the simple GCN.

On the other hand, our experiments with GLN suggests that we can remove all the perceptron layers and focus only on improving the propagation layers. To this end, we introduce a novel Attentionbased Graph Neural Network (AGNN). AGNN is simple; it only has a single scalar parameter β (t) at each intermediate layer. AGNN captures relevance; the proposed attention mechanism over neighbors in (5) learns which neighbors are more relevant and weighs their contributions accordingly. This builds on the long line of successes of attention mechanisms in summarizing long sentences or large images, by capturing which word or part-of-image is most relevant (Xu et al., 2015; Graves et al., 2014; Bahdanau et al., 2014) . Particularly, we use the attention formulation similar to the one used in Graves et al. (2014) . 2 It only has one parameter and we found this is important for successfully training the model when the number of labels is small as in our semi-supervised learning setting.

4.1. AGNN MODEL:

We start with a word-embedding layer that maps a bag-of-words representation of a document into an averaged word embedding, and the word embedding W (0) ∈ R dx×d h is to be trained as a part of the model:

EQUATION

This is followed by layers of attention-guided propagation layers parameterized by β (t) ∈ R at each layer,

EQUATION

where the propagation matrix P (t) ∈ R n×n is also a function of the input states H (t) and is zero for absent edges such that the output row-vector of node i is

EQUATION

j ) ] j∈N (i)∪{i} and cos(x, y) = x T y/ x y with the L 2 norm x , for t ∈ {1, . . . , } and an integer . Here is the number of propagation layers. Note that the new propagation above is dynamic; propagation changes over the layers with differing β (t) and also the hidden states. It is also adaptive; it learns to weight more relevant neighbors higher. We add the self-loop in the propagation to ensure that the features and the hidden states of the node itself are not lost in the propagation process. The output layer has a weight W (1) ∈ R d h ×dy :

EQUATION

The weights W (0) , W (1) , and β (t) 's are trained on a cross entropy loss in (2). To ease the notations, we have assumed that the input feature vectors to the first and last layers are augmented with a scalar constant of one, so that the standard bias term can be included in the parameters W (0) and W (1) .

The softmax function at attention ensures that the propagation layer P (t) row-sums to one. The attention from node j to node i is

EQUATION

with

EQUATION

j ) which captures how relevant j is to i, as measured by the cosine of the angle between the corresponding hidden states. We show how we can interpret the attentions in Section 5.2 and show that the attention selects neighbors with the same class to be more relevant. On the standard benchmark datasets on citation networks, we show in Section 5 that this architecture achieves the best performance in Table 2 .

Here we note that independently from this work attention over sets has been proposed as "neighborhood attention" (Duan et al., 2017; Hoshen, 2017) for a different application. The main difference of AGNN with respect to these work is the fact that in AGNN attention is computed over a neighborhood of a node on a graph, whereas in these work attention over set of all entities is used to construct a "soft neighborhood".

5. EXPERIMENTS ON BENCHMARK CITATION NETWORKS:

On standard benchmark datasets of three citation networks, we test our proposed AGNN model on semi-supervised learning tasks. We test on a fixed split of labeled/validation/test sets from Yang et al. (2016) and compare against baseline methods in Table 2 . We also test it on random splits of the same sizes in Table 3 , and random splits with larger number of labeled nodes in Table 4 .

Benchmark Datasets. A citation network dataset consists of documents as nodes and citation links as directed edges. Each node has a human annotated topic from a finite set of classes and a feature vector. We consider three datasets3 . For CiteSeer and Cora datasets, the feature vector has binary entries indicating the presence/absence of the corresponding word from a dictionary. For PubMed dataset, the feature vector has real-values entries indicating Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) of the corresponding word from a dictionary. Although the networks are directed, we use undirected versions of the graphs for all experiments, as is common in all baseline approaches.

Labeled nodes:



Dataset:

Nodes Edges Classes Features Table 2 For AGNN, we use a fixed number of d h = 16 units in the hidden layers and use 4 propagation layers ( = 4) for CiteSeer and Pubmed and 3 propagation layers ( = 3) for Cora as defined in (7). For GLN, we use 2 propagation layers as defined in (1). We row-normalize the input feature vectors, as is standard in the literature. The tables below show the average accuracy with the standard error over 100 training instances with random weight initializations. We implement our model on TensorFlow (Abadi et al., 2016) , and the computational complexity of evaluating AGNN is O( d h |E| + d x d h n). Detailed desription of the experiments is provided in Appendix B.

5.1. PREDICTION ACCURACY:

Fixed data splits. In this first experiment, we use the fixed data splits from Yang et al. (2016) as they are the standard benchmark data splits in literature. All experiments are run on the same fixed split of 20 labeled nodes for each class, 500 nodes for validation, 1,000 nodes for test, and the rest of nodes as unlabeled data. Perhaps surprisingly, the linear classifier GLN we proposed in (3) achieves performance comparable to or exceeding the state-of-the-art performance of GCN. This leads to our novel attention-based model AGNN defined in (6), which achieves the best accuracy on all datasets with a gap larger than the standard error. The classification accuracy of all the baseline methods are collected from (Yang et al., 2016; Kipf & Welling, 2016; Such et al., 2017; Monti et al., 2016; Buchnik & Cohen, 2017; Verma et al., 2017) .

In semi-supervised learning on graphs, it is critical to utilize both the structure of the graph and the node features. Methods not using all the given data achieve performance far from the stateof-the-art. (Lu & Getoor, 2003) 69.1 75.1 73.9 ManiReg (Belkin et al., 2006) 60.1 59.5 70.7 SemiEmb (Weston et al., 2012) 59.6 59.0 71.1 DCNN (Atwood & Towsley, 2016) 76.8 73.0 Planetoid (Yang et al., 2016) 64.7 75.7 77.2 MoNet (Monti et al., 2016) 81.7 78.8 Graph-CNN (Such et al., 2017) 76.3 DynamicFilter (Verma et al., 2017) 81.6 79.0 Bootstrap (Buchnik & Cohen, 2017) 53.6 78.4 78.8 GCN (Kipf & Welling, 2016) 70 (Yang et al., 2016) .

A breakthrough result of Planetoid by Yang et al. (2016) significantly improved upon the existing skip-gram based method of DeepWalk and node2vec and the Laplacian regularized methods of ManiReg and SemiEmb. Kipf & Welling (2016) was the first to apply a graph neural network to citation datasets, and achieved the state-of-the-art performance with GCN. Other variations of graph neural networks immediately followed, achieving comparable performance with MoNet, Graph-CNN, and DynamicFilter. Bootstrap uses a Laplacian regularized approach of (Zhou et al., 2004a) as a sub-routine with bootstrapping to feed high-margin predictions as seeds.

Random splits. Next, following the setting of Buchnik & Cohen (2017) , we run experiments keeping the same size in labeled, validation, and test sets as in Table 2 , but now selecting those nodes uniformly at random. This, along with the fact that different topics have different number of nodes in it, means that the labels might not be spread evenly across the topics. For 20 such randomly drawn dataset splits, average accuracy is shown in Table 3 with the standard error. As we do not force equal number of labeled data for each class, we observe that the performance degrades for all methods compared to Table 2 , except for DeepWalk. AGNN achieves the best performance consistently. Here, we note that Kipf & Welling (2016) does a similar but different experiment using GCN, where random labeled nodes are evenly spread across topics so that each topic has exactly 20 labeled examples. As this difference in sampling might affect the accuracy, we do not report those results in this table.

Method:

CiteSeer Cora PubMed DeepWalk (Perozzi et al., 2014) 47.2 70.2 72.0 node2vec (Grover & Leskovec, 2016) 

5.2. QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS:

One useful aspect of incorporating attention into a model is that it provides some form of interpretation capability (Bahdanau et al., 2014) . The learned P (t) ij 's in Eq. ( 7) represent the attention from node j to node i, and provide insights on how relevant node j is in classifying node i. In Figure 1 , we provide statistics of this attention over all adjacent pairs of nodes for Cora and CiteSeer datasets. We refer to Figure 3 for similar statistics on PubMed. In Figure 1 , we show average attention from a node in topic c 2 (column) to a node in topic c 1 (row), which we call the relevance from c 2 to c 1 and is defined as

EQUATION

for edge-wise relevance score defined as

EQUATION

where |N (i)| is the degree of node i, and

S c1,c2 = {(i, j) ∈ E s and Y i = c 1 , Y j = c 2 } where E s = E ∪ {(i, i) for i ∈ V }

is the edge set augmented with self-loops to include all the attentions learned. If we are not using any attention, then the typical propagation will be uniform P ij = 1/(|N (i)| + 1), in which case the above normalized attention is zero. We are measuring for each edge the variation of attention P ij from uniform 1/(|N (i)| + 1) as a multiplicative error, normalized by 1/(|N (i)| + 1).

We believe this is the right normalization, as attention should be measure in relative strength to others in the same neighborhood, and not in absolute additive differences. We are measuring this multiplicative variation of the attention, averaged over the ordered pairs of classes.

Figure 1 shows the relevance score for CiteSeer and Cora datasets. (PubMed is shown in Appendix A.) For both datasets, the diagonal entries are dominant indicating that the attention is learning to put more weight to those in the same class. A higher value of Relevance(c 2 → c 1 ) indicates that, on average, a node in topic c 1 pays more attention to a neighbor in topic c 2 than neighbors from other topics. For CiteSeer dataset (Figure 1 left), we are showing the average attention at the first propagation layer, P (t=1) , for illustration. In the off-diagonals, the most influential relations are HCI→Agents, Agents→ML, Agents→HCI, and ML→Agents, and the least influential relations are AI→IR and DB→ML. Note that these are papers in computer science from late 90s to early 2000s. For Cora dataset (Figure 1 right), we are showing the relevance score of the second propagation layer, P (t=2) , for illustration. In the off-diagonals, the most influential relations are CB→PM, PM→CB, Rule→PM, and PM→Rule, and the least influential relations are GA→PM and PM→RL. This dataset has papers in computer science from the 90s. We note that these relations are estimated solely based on the available datasets for that period of time and might not accurately reflect the relations for the entire academic fields. We also consider these relations as a static property in this analysis. If we have a larger corpus over longer period of time, it is possible to learn the influence conditioned on the period and visualize how these relations change.

Next, we analyze the edges with high and low relevance scores. We remove the self-loops and then sort the edges according to the relevance score defined in Eq. ( 9). We take the top 100 and bottom 100 edges and with respect to their relevance scores, and report the fraction of the edges which are connecting nodes from the same class. Table 5 shows the result on the benchmark datasets for the relevance scores calculated using the last propagation layer. This suggests that our architecture learns to put higher attention between nodes of the same class. Finally, we analyze those nodes in the test sets that were mistaken by GCN but correctly classified by AGNN, and show how our attention mechanism weighted the contribution of its local neighborhood, and show three illustrative examples in Figure 2 . More examples of this local attention network (including the legends for the color coding of the topics) are provided in Appendix A. We show a entire 2-hop neighborhood of a target node (marked by a thick outline) from the test set of the fixed data splits of Citeseer, Cora, or Pubmed. The colors denote the true classes of the nodes (including the target) in the target's neighborhood, some of which are unknown to the models at the training time. The radius of a node j is proportional to the attention to the target node i aggregated over all the layers, i.e. (P (t=4) P (t=3) P (t=2) P (t=1) ) ij for CiteSeer. The size of the target node reflects its self-attention defined in a similar way. The first example on the left is node 8434 from PubMed. AGNN correctly classifies the target node as light blue, whereas GCN mistakes it for yellow, possibly because it is connected to more yellow nodes. Not only has the attention mechanism learned to put more weight to its light blue 1-hop neighbor, but put equally heavy weights to a path of light blue neighbors some of which are not immediately connected to the target node. The second example in the middle is node 1580 from PubMed. AGNN correctly classifies it as yellow, whereas GCN mistakes it for a red, possibly because it only has two neighbors. Not only has the attention mechanism learned to put more weight to the yellow neighbor, but it has weighted the yellow neighbor (who is connected to many yellow nodes and perhaps has more reliable hidden states representing the true yellow class) even more than itself.

The last example on the right is node 1512 from CiteSeer. AGNN correctly classifies it as light blue, whereas GCN mistakes it for a white. This is a special example as those two nodes are completely isolated. Due to the static and non-adaptive propagation of GCN, it ends up giving the same prediction for such isolated pairs. If the pair has two different true classes, then it always fails on at least on one of them (in this case the light blue node). However, AGNN is more flexible in adapting to such graph topology and puts more weight to the target node itself, correctly classifying both.

6. CONCLUSIONS:

In this paper, we present an attention-based graph neural network model for semi-supervised classification on a graph. We demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms competing methods on the standard benchmark citation network datasets. We also show that the learned attention also provides interesting insights on how neighbors influence each other. 

B EXPERIMENT AND ARCHITECT DETAILS:

In this section we will list all the choices made in training and tuning of hyper-parameters. The parameters are chosen as to maximize the validation. All the models use Adam optimization algorithm with full-batchs, as standard in other works on GNNs (Kipf & Welling, 2016; Such et al., 2017) . We also a weight decay term to the objective function for all the learnable weights. We add dropout to the first and last layers of all models.

In Table 6 . we show the hyper-parameters used in training the AGNN models for various settings and datasets. For Cora dataset the architecture consist of = 3 propagation layers, but the first prop- agation layer P (t=1) is non-trainable and the variable β (t=1) value is fixed at zero. While training these AGNN models we maintain the validation accuracy for each iteration and finally choose the trained model parameters from the iteration where average validation accuracy of previous 4 epochs is maximized. For the k-fold cross validation setting we take the epoch with maximum validation accuracy.

:

Random walk which moves from a node to one of its neighbors selected uniformly at random.

We have experimented other types of more complex attention formulations but we found the training becomes much less stable especially when the number of labeled nodes is small.

https://linqs.soe.ucsc.edu/node/236

Figures and Tables:

Figure 1: Relevance score in Eq. (8) from a neighbor node with column-class to a center node in row-class. For example the average normalized attention to Agents from HCI is = -0.141 , largest off-diagonal entry in CiteSeer. The average attention to Probabilistic Methods (PM) from Case Based (CB) is 0.017, largest off-diagonal entry in Cora.

Figure 3: Average attention in Eq. (8) from a column class to a row class

Figure 5: Examples from Cora dataset of attention strength in the local neighborhood of a target node (in thick outline) from the test set that is mistaken by GCN but correctly classified by AGNN. Colors are true classes and node sizes are proportional to the attention strength from a neighbor to the target node. Labeled nodes from training set are marked with '*'.

Figure 6: Examples from Pubmed dataset of attention strength in the local neighborhood of a target node (in thick outline) from the test set that is mistaken by GCN but correctly classified by AGNN. Colors are true classes and node sizes are proportional to the attention strength from a neighbor to the target node. Labeled nodes from training set are marked with '*'.



Table content: <table><tr><td>CiteSeer</td><td>3,327</td><td>4,732</td><td>6</td><td>3,703</td><td>120</td><td>120</td><td>2,218</td><td>2,994</td></tr><tr><td>Cora</td><td>2,708</td><td>5,429</td><td>7</td><td>1,433</td><td>140</td><td>140</td><td>1,805</td><td>2,437</td></tr><tr><td colspan="3">PubMed 19,717 44,328</td><td>3</td><td>500</td><td>60</td><td colspan="3">60 13,145 17,745</td></tr></table>



Table content: <table/>

Classification accuracy with a fixed split of data from

Table content: <table><tr><td>.3</td><td>81.5</td><td>79.0</td></tr></table>

Classification accuracy with random splits of the data. Compared to Table2, the performance increases with the size of the training set, and AGNN consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art architecture for this experiment.

Table content: <table><tr><td/><td>47.3</td><td>72.9</td><td>72.4</td></tr><tr><td>Bootstrap (Buchnik &amp; Cohen, 2017)</td><td>50.3</td><td>78.2</td><td>75.6</td></tr><tr><td>GLN</td><td colspan="3">68.4±0.45 80.0±0.43 77.7±0.63</td></tr><tr><td>AGNN (this paper)</td><td colspan="3">69.8±0.35 81.0±0.34 78.0±0.46</td></tr></table>

Classification accuracy with larger sets of labelled nodes.

Table content: <table/>

141 , largest off-diagonal entry in CiteSeer. The average attention to Probabilistic Methods (PM) from Case Based (CB) is 0.017, largest off-diagonal entry in Cora. Fraction of edges from top 100 most relevant edges and bottom 100 least relevant edges which are connecting two distinct nodes from the same class.

Table content: <table><tr><td/><td colspan="3">CiteSeer Cora PubMed</td></tr><tr><td>Top 100</td><td>0.69</td><td>0.64</td><td>0.69</td></tr><tr><td>Bottom 100</td><td>0.34</td><td>0.09</td><td>0.13</td></tr></table>

In training, we have tried more We show three selected target nodes in the test set that are mistaken by GCN but correctly classified by AGNN. We denote this target node by the node with a thick outline (node 8434 from PubMed on the left, node 1580 from PubMed in the middle, and node 1512 from CiteSeer on the right). We show the strength of attention from a node in the 2-hop neighborhood to the target node by the size of the corresponding node. Colors represent the hidden true classes (nodes with the same color belong to the same topic). None of the nodes in the figure was in the training set, hence none of the colors were revealed. Still, we observe that AGNN has managed to put more attention to those nodes in the same (hidden) classes, allowing the trained model to find the correct labels. complex attention models. However, due to the increased model complexity the training was not stable and does not give higher accuracy. We believe that for semi-supervised setting with such a limited number of labeled examples, reducing model complexity is important. Note that we are able to train deeper (4-layers) models compared to a shallower (2-layers) model of GCN, in part due to the fact that we remove the non-linear layers and reduce the model complexity significantly. In comparison, deeper GCN models are known to be unstable and do not give the performance of shallower GCNs(Kipf & Welling, 2016).Xiaojin Zhu and Zoubin Ghahramani. Learning from labeled and unlabeled data with label propagation. 2002.Xiaojin Zhu, Zoubin Ghahramani, and John D Lafferty. Semi-supervised learning using gaussian fields and harmonic functions. In Proceedings of the 20th International conference on Machine learning (ICML-03), pp.912-919, 2003.

Table content: <table><tr><td>PubMed 8434</td><td>PubMed 1580</td><td>CiteSeer 1512</td></tr><tr><td>Figure 2:</td><td/><td/></tr></table>

Peer review (iclr2018):
 The paper proposes a semi supervised learning algorithm for graph node classification. The Algorithm is inspired from Graph Neural Networks and more precisely graph convolutional NNs recently proposed by ref (Kipf et al 2016)) in the paper. These NNs alternate 2 types of layers: non linear projection and diffusion, the latter incorporates the graph relational information by constraining neighbor nodes to have close representations according to some “graph metrics”. The authors propose a model with simplified projection layers and more sophisticated diffusion ones, incorporating a simple attention mechanism. Experiments are performed on citation textual datasets. Comparisons with published results on the same datasets are presented. The paper is clear and develops interesting ideas relevant to semi-supervised graph node classification. One finding is that simple models perform as well as more complex ones in this setting where labeled data is scarce. Another one is the importance of integrating relational information for classifying nodes when it is available. The attention mechanism itself is extremely simple, and learns one parameter per diffusion layers. One parameter weights correlations between node embeddings in a diffusion layer. I understand that you tried more complex attention mechanisms, but the one finally selected is barely an attention mechanism and rather a simple “importance” weight. This is not a criticism, but this makes the title somewhat misleading. The experiments show that the proposed model is state of the art for graph node classification. The performance is on par with some other recent models according to table 2. The other tests are also interesting, but the comparison could have been extended to other models e.g. GCN. You advocate the role of the diffusion layers, and in the experiments you stack 3 to 4 such layers. It would be interesting to have indications on the compromise performance/ number of diffusion layers and on the evolution of these performances when adding such layers. The bibliography on semi-supervised learning in graphs for classification is light and should be enhanced. Overall this is an interesting paper with nice findings. The originality is however relatively limited in a field where many recent papers have been proposed, and the experiments need to be completed.