Enhance Information Propagation for Graph Neural Network by Heterogeneous Aggregations

Abstract: Graph neural networks are emerging as continuation of deep learning success w.r.t. graph data. Tens of different graph neural network variants have been proposed, most following a neighborhood aggregation scheme, where the node features are updated via aggregating features of its neighboring nodes from layer to layer. Though related research surges, the power of GNNs are still not on-par-with their counterpart CNNs in computer vision and RNNs in natural language processing. We rethink this problem from the perspective of information propagation, and propose to enhance information propagation among GNN layers by combining heterogeneous aggregations. We argue that as richer information are propagated from shallow to deep layers, the discriminative capability of features formulated by GNN can benefit from it. As our first attempt in this direction, a new generic GNN layer formulation and upon this a new GNN variant referred as HAG-Net is proposed. We empirically validate the effectiveness of HAG-Net on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and elaborate all the design options and criterions along with.