Local-to-global Perspectives on Graph Neural Networks

Abstract: This thesis presents a local-to-global perspective on graph neural networks (GNN), the leading architecture to process graph-structured data. After categorizing GNN into local Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNN) and global Graph transformers, we present three pieces of work: 1) study the convergence property of a type of global GNN, Invariant Graph Networks, 2) connect the local MPNN and global Graph Transformer, and 3) use local MPNN for graph coarsening, a standard subroutine used in global modeling.