Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Graph Neural Networks with Experience Replay

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently received significant research attention due to their superior performance on a variety of graph-related learning tasks. Most of the current works focus on either static or dynamic graph settings, addressing a single particular task, e.g., node/graph classification, link prediction. In this work, we investigate the question: can GNNs be applied to continuously learning a sequence of tasks? Towards that, we explore the Continual Graph Learning (CGL) paradigm and present the Experience Replay based framework ER-GNN for CGL to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem in existing GNNs. ER-GNN stores knowledge from previous tasks as experiences and replays them when learning new tasks to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting issue. We propose three experience node selection strategies: mean of feature, coverage maximization, and influence maximization, to guide the process of selecting experience nodes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our ER-GNN and shed light on the incremental graph (non-Euclidean) structure learning.