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Poster
From Local Structures to Size Generalization in Graph Neural Networks
Gilad Yehudai · Ethan Fetaya · Eli Meirom · Gal Chechik · Haggai Maron

Tue Jul 20 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PDT) @
in Poster Session 1 »

Graph neural networks (GNNs) can process graphs of different sizes, but their ability to generalize across sizes, specifically from small to large graphs, is still not well understood. In this paper, we identify an important type of data where generalization from small to large graphs is challenging: graph distributions for which the local structure depends on the graph size. This effect occurs in multiple important graph learning domains, including social and biological networks. We first prove that when there is a difference between the local structures, GNNs are not guaranteed to generalize across sizes: there are "bad" global minima that do well on small graphs but fail on large graphs. We then study the size-generalization problem empirically and demonstrate that when there is a discrepancy in local structure, GNNs tend to converge to non-generalizing solutions. Finally, we suggest two approaches for improving size generalization, motivated by our findings. Notably, we propose a novel Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) task aimed at learning meaningful representations of local structures that appear in large graphs. Our SSL task improves classification accuracy on several popular datasets.

Keywords: Networks and Relational Learning · Algorithms

Author Information

Gilad Yehudai (Weizmann Institute of Science)
Ethan Fetaya (Bar-Ilan University)
Eli Meirom (NVIDIA)
Gal Chechik (Nvidia)
Haggai Maron (NVIDIA Research)

I am a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research. My main fields of interest are machine learning, optimization, and shape analysis. More specifically, I am working on applying deep learning to irregular domains (e.g., graphs, point clouds, and surfaces) and graph/shape matching problems. I completed my Ph.D. in 2019 at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Prof. Yaron Lipman.

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