Encoding Node Diffusion Competence and Role Significance for Network Dismantling

Abstract: Percolation theory shows that removing a small fraction of critical nodes can lead to the disintegration of a large network into many disconnected tiny subnetworks. The network dismantling task focuses on how to efficiently select the least such critical nodes. Most existing approaches focus on measuring nodes' importance from either functional or topological viewpoint. Different from theirs, we argue that nodes' importance can be measured from both of the two complementary aspects: The functional importance can be based on the nodes' competence in relaying network information; While the topological importance can be measured from nodes' regional structural patterns. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning framework for network dismantling, called DCRS, which encodes and fuses both node diffusion competence and role significance. Specifically, we propose a graph diffusion neural network which emulates information diffusion for competence encoding; We divide nodes with similar egonet structural patterns into a few roles, and construct a role graph on which to encode node role significance. The DCRS converts and fuses the two encodings to output a final ranking score for selecting critical nodes. Experiments on both real-world networks and synthetic networks demonstrate that our scheme significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors for its mostly requiring much fewer nodes to dismantle a network.