Graph Pooling by Edge Cut

1 INTRODUCTION . Convolution neural networks ( LeCun et al. , 1995 ) have been proven to be very efficient at learning meaningful patterns for many articificial intelligence tasks . They convey the ability to learn hierarchical informations in data with Euclidean grid-like structures such as images and textual data . Convolutional Neural Networks ( CNNs ) have rapidly become state-of-the-art methods in the fields of computer vision ( Russakovsky et al. , 2015 ) and natural language processing ( Devlin et al. , 2018 ) . However in many scientific fields , studied data have an underlying graph or manifold structure such as communication networks ( whether social or technical ) or knowledge graphs . Recently there have been many attempts to extend convolution to such non-Euclidean structured data ( Hammond et al. , 2011 ; Kipf & Welling , 2016 ; Defferrard et al. , 2016 ) . In these new approaches , the authors propose to compute node embeddings in a semi-supervised fashion in order to perform node classification . Those node embeddings can also be used for link prediction by computing distances between each node of the graph ( Hammond et al. , 2011 ; Kipf & Welling , 2016 ) . An image can be seen as a special case of graph that lies on a 2D grid and where nodes are pixels and edges are weighted according to the difference of intensity and to the distance between two pixels ( Zhang et al. , 2015 ; Achanta & Susstrunk , 2017 ; Van den Bergh et al. , 2012 ; Stutz et al. , 2018 ) . In the emerging field of graph analysis based on convolutions and deep neural networks , it is appealing to try to apply models that worked best in the field of computer vision . In this effort , several ways to perform convolutions in graphs have been proposed ( Hammond et al. , 2011 ; Kipf & Welling , 2016 ; Defferrard et al. , 2016 ; Gilmer et al. , 2017 ; Veličković et al. , 2017 ; Xu et al. , 2018 ; Battaglia et al. , 2016 ; Kearnes et al. , 2016 ) . Moreover , when dealing with image classification , pooling is an important step ( Gao & Ji , 2019 ; Ying et al. , 2018 ; Defferrard et al. , 2016 ; Diehl , 2019 ) . It allows us to extract hierarchical features in images in order to make the classification more accuracte . While it is easy to apply coarsening to an image , it isn ’ t obvious how to coarsen a graph since nodes in graphs are not ordered like pixels in images . In this work we present a novel pooling layer based on edge scoring and related to the minCUT problem . The main contributions of this work are summarized below : 1 . Learned pooling layer . A differentiable pooling layer that learns how to aggregate nodes in clusters to produce a pooled graph of reduced size . 2 . A novel approach based on edge cuts . We develop a novel pooling layer . Most coarsening strategies are based on nodes , either by finding clusters or by deleting nodes that carry less information of the graph structure . In our approach , we focus on edges to uncover communities of topologically close nodes in graphs . 3 . The definition of a regularization that aims at approximating the problem of minCUT . We regularize our problem by a term that corresponds to the problem of Ncut in order to learn edge scores and clusters that are consistent with the topology of the graph . We show that by computing an edge score matrix , we can easily compute this regularization term . 4 . Experimental results . Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets . We compare it with kernel methods and state-of-the-art message passing algorithms that use pooling layers as aggregation processes . 2 RELATED WORK . Recently there has been a rich line of research , inspired by deep models in images , that aims at redefining neural networks in graphs and in particular convolutional neural networks ( Defferrard et al. , 2016 ; Kipf & Welling , 2016 ; Veličković et al. , 2017 ; Hamilton et al. , 2017 ; Bronstein et al. , 2017 ; Bruna et al. , 2013 ; Scarselli et al. , 2009 ) . Those convolutions can be viewed as message passing algorithms that are composed of two phases Gilmer et al . ( 2017 ) . They find their success in their ability to uncover meaningful patterns in graphs by propagating information from nodes to their neighbors . Moreover , many works on graph neural networks also focus on redefining pooling in graphs . The pooling operation allows us to obtain different versions of the input graph at different scales . In graphs , the pooling step isn ’ t trivial because of the nature the data . Nodes can have different numbers of neighbors and graphs can have different sizes . To cope with these issues , different pooling strategies have been proposed : • Top-k : Like Gao & Ji ( 2019 ) , the objective is to score nodes according to their importance in the graph and then to keep only nodes with the top-k scores . By removing nodes we can remove important connections in the graph and produce disconnected graphs . A step to increase connectivity is necessary . This is done by adding edges at 2-hops from the input graph . • Cluster identification : This is usually done by projecting node features on a learned weight to obtain an assignment matrix . Nodes that have close embeddings are projected on the same cluster . After having obtained the assignment matrix , super nodes at the coarsened level can be computed by aggregating all nodes that belong to the same cluster ( Ying et al. , 2018 ) . • Edge based pooling : An edge contraction pooling layer has recently been proposed by Diehl ( 2019 ) . They compute edge scores in order to successively contract pairs of nodes , which means that they successively merge pairs of nodes that are linked by edges of the highest scores . • Deterministic coarsening strategies : Finally , a way to perform pooling in graphs can simply be to apply a deterministic clustering algorithm in order to identify clusters of nodes that will represent super nodes in the coarsened level ( Defferrard et al. , 2016 ; Ying et al. , 2018 ) . The main drawback of it is that the strategy isn ’ t learned and thus may not be suited to the graph classification task . In this work we define a new pooling layer that is based on edge cuts . Like Diehl ( 2019 ) we focus our pooling method on edges instead of nodes . In their work , Diehl ( 2019 ) calculate scores on edges to perform contraction pooling . This means that at each pooling step , they merge pairs of nodes that are associated with the highest edge scores , without merging nodes that were already involved in a contracted edge . This method results in pooled graphs of size divided by 2 compared to the input graph . The main similarity with our work is that we compute edge scores to characterize edge importance inspired by Graph Attention Transform ( Veličković et al. , 2017 ) . There are several differences with the pooling layer that we propose in this work . We want our pooling layer not to be constrained by a number of communities or by a predefined size of pooled graph . Moreover , our pooling layer works by edge cuts and the goal is to remove edges that minimize the minCUT problem ( Stoer & Wagner , 1997 ) . Once edges are cut , the graph is no longer connected and is composed of several connected components . These connected components correspond to super nodes in the coarsened level . In this work , we will first introduce the pooling architecture based on edge scoring in section 3.1 . We will then relate this pooling layer to the minCUT problem in section 3.2 . We will finally compare this pooling layer to state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets on a graph classification task and a node classification task in section 4 . 3 POOLING ARCHITECTURE . When designing a pooling layer , most algorithms need a number of classes for the pooling layer that is usually set as a hyperparameter . This is very restrictive especially when working on graphs of different sizes . Indeed , the pooling layer should cluster nodes according to the topology of the graph without being constrained by a number of classes . In this section we present our pooling layer that is based on edge cutting and that does not necessitate any a priori on the number of classes that needs to be found . 3.1 GNNS . Let G = ( V , E , X ) be a graph composed of a set of nodes V , a set of edges E and a node feature matrix X ∈ Rn×f0 where f0 is the dimensionality of node features . We denote by A the adjacency matrix . Graph neural networks . We build our work upon graph neural networks ( GNNs ) . There are several architectures of graph neural networks that have been proposed by Defferrard et al . ( 2016 ) ; Kipf & Welling ( 2016 ) ; Veličković et al . ( 2017 ) or Bruna & Li ( 2017 ) . Those graph neural network models are all based on propagation mechanisms of node features that follow a general neural message passing architecture ( Ying et al. , 2018 ; Gilmer et al. , 2017 ) : Z ( l+1 ) = MP ( A , Z ( l ) ; W ( l ) ) ( 1 ) where Z ( l ) ∈ Rn×fl are node embeddings computed after l steps of MP , Z ( 0 ) = X , and MP is the message propagation function , which depends on the adjacency matrix . W ( l ) is a trainable weight matrix that depends on layer l and fl is the dimensionality of node embeddings . The pooling layer that we introduce next can be used with any neural message passing algorithm that follows the propagation rule 1 . In all the following of our work we denote by MP the algorithm . For the experiments , we consider the Graph Convolutional Network ( GCN ) defined by ( Kipf & Welling , 2016 ) . This model is based on an approximation of convolutions on graphs defined by ( Defferrard et al. , 2016 ) and that use spectral decompositions of the Laplacian . It is very popular because it is very efficient computationally and obtains state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets . This layer propagates node features to 1-hop neighbors . Its propagation rule is the following : Z ( l+1 ) = MP ( A , Z ( l ) ; W ( l ) ) = GCN ( A , Z ( l ) ) = ρ ( D̃−1/2ÃD̃−1/2Z ( l ) W ( l ) ) ( 2 ) Where ρ is a non-linear function ( a ReLU in our case ) , Ã = A + In is the adjacency matrix with added self-loops and D̃ii = ∑ j Ãij is the degree diagonal matrix associated with adjacency matrix Ã . Scoring edges . After layer l , each node i in the graph has an embedding Z ( l ) i . To simplify notations , we consider all matrices to be associated to layer l and we do not keep the exponant l. For example , we write feature of node i at layer l , Zi and its dimensionality is denoted by f . Based on these embeddings , we develop a scoring function that characterizes the importance of each edge of the graph . The input of our scoring algorithm is a set of node features , { Z1 , ... , Zn } ∈ Rn×f . The scoring function produces a matrix S ∈ Rn×n associated with layer l , Sij = 1 ( i , j ) ∈E ∗ sij where sij is the score of edge ( i , j ) . In order to compute the score of each edge of the graph , we apply a shared linear transformation , parametrized by a weight matrix Wpool ∈ Rf×d , to each node of the graph , d being the output size of the linear transformation . We then perform self-attention on nodes , as used in the Graph Attention Network ( GAT ) ( Veličković et al. , 2017 ) , by applying a shared weight a : R× R→ R to obtain a score on edge ( i , j ) ∈ E : sij = σ ( a [ WpoolZi||WpoolZj ] ) ( 3 ) Where σ is the sigmoid function , Wpool and a are trainable matrices associated with layer l and [ WpoolZi||WpoolZj ] ∈ R2d is a vector that is the concatenation of WpoolZi and WpoolZj . Let ’ s note that this scoring function isn ’ t symmetric and depends on the order of nodes . We can symmetrize this function by computing sij = 1 2 ( σ ( a [ WpoolZi||WpoolZj ] ) + σ ( a [ WpoolZj ||WpoolZi ] ) ) By applying the sigmoid function to the attention mechanism we compute an importance of edges . The goal is to obtain a distribution on edges for whose nodes that are close topologically have an edge which value is close to 1 . In the opposite case , we would like an edge to have a weight close to 0 if it links two nodes that do not lie in the same community . By doing so we would like to solve the minimum cut problem in graphs . After having computed the edge score matrix , we keep a ratio r of edges that correspond to edges with the r % higher scores . We obtain a threshold sthreshold that corresponds to the rth percentile of the distribution of edge scores . This way , we cut edges which scores are close to 0 in the graph . Edges with the smallest scores represent edges that link nodes that aren ’ t in the same community and thus by cutting those edges , we separate the graph into several clusters . We denote by Scut the score matrix with values under sthreshold truncated to 0 . Each row is renormalized by the number of positive components . This renormalization is useful in the following to compute node features in the coarsened level . ∀ ( i , j ) ∈ V 2 , Scutij = 1∑ j∈N ( i ) 1sij≥sthreshold sij1sij≥sthreshold We then extract the connected components of the new graph with cutted edges . Those connected components represent super nodes in the pooled graph . We obtain a cluster assignment matrix C ∈ Rn×c , c being a free parameter that isn ’ t fixed and that can vary during the training of the algorithm . After layer l , the pooled adjacency matrix and the pooled feature matrix are thus : A ( l+1 ) = A ( l ) pool = C ( l ) TA ( l ) C ( l ) Z ( l+1 ) = Z ( l ) pool = C ( l ) TS ( l ) cutZ ( l ) Remark . The multiplication by ScutZ makes the weightsWpool and a trainable by back-propagation . Otherwise it wouldn ’ t be the case because the function that outputs the matrix C by finding connected components from matrix Scut is not differentiable . Moreover , this multiplication weights the importance of each node feature in the super node of the coarsened level . In order to compute the feature Zk of cluster ( or super node ) k , we compute a node importance score scuti at layer l for each node i of the graph : scuti = 1∑ j∈N ( i ) 1 scut ( l ) ij > 0 ∑ j∈N ( i ) scutij The feature Zk of cluster k is then a weighted mean of the features of nodes that belong to cluster k : Zk = ∑ i∈k scutiZi Moreover , for edge scores to be consistent with the minCUT algorithm , we add a regularization term that we define in the next section .

Summary: This manuscript proposes a new pooling layer in Graph Neural Networks (GNN). By computing certain scores on edges which indicate the importance of edges in the process of information propagation, top r% edges are selected and a pooled graph is constructed by considering the connected components to be super nodes. The authors tried to explain some connection between their pooled graph and the normalized cut problem, which is not clearly stated in the manuscript. Even though the manuscript explores an interesting and timely topic, their approach is not technically appealing and the explanations are not enough to thoroughly understand the authors' ideas. My main concerns and major questions are as follows: