AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper
Rethinking Graph Regularization for Graph Neural Networks
- Han Yang
- Kaili Ma
- James Cheng
The graph Laplacian regularization term is usually used in semi-supervised representation learning to provide graph structure information for a model f(X). However, with the recent popularity of graph neural networks (GNNs), directly encoding graph structure A into a model, i. e. , f(A, X), has become the more common approach. While we show that graph Laplacian regularization brings little-to-no benefit to existing GNNs, and propose a simple but non-trivial variant of graph Laplacian regularization, called Propagation-regularization (P-reg), to boost the performance of existing GNN models. We provide formal analyses to show that P-reg not only infuses extra information (that is not captured by the traditional graph Laplacian regularization) into GNNs, but also has the capacity equivalent to an infinite-depth graph convolutional network. We demonstrate that P-reg can effectively boost the performance of existing GNN models on both node-level and graph-level tasks across many different datasets.