AM-GCN: Adaptive Multi-channel Graph Convolutional Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces AM-GCN, an adaptive multi-channel graph convolutional network that enhances the fusion of node features and topological structures, leading to improved semi-supervised classification accuracy.

Contribution

We propose a novel GCN architecture that extracts and adaptively weights embeddings from node features, structures, and their combinations, addressing limitations of existing GCNs.

Findings

AM-GCN outperforms state-of-the-art GCNs on benchmark datasets.

The attention mechanism effectively learns importance weights for embeddings.

Enhanced fusion of features and structures improves classification accuracy.

Abstract

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have gained great popularity in tackling various analytics tasks on graph and network data. However, some recent studies raise concerns about whether GCNs can optimally integrate node features and topological structures in a complex graph with rich information. In this paper, we first present an experimental investigation. Surprisingly, our experimental results clearly show that the capability of the state-of-the-art GCNs in fusing node features and topological structures is distant from optimal or even satisfactory. The weakness may severely hinder the capability of GCNs in some classification tasks, since GCNs may not be able to adaptively learn some deep correlation information between topological structures and node features. Can we remedy the weakness and design a new type of GCNs that can retain the advantages of the state-of-the-art GCNs and, at the same time, enhance the capability of fusing topological structures and node features substantially? We tackle the challenge and propose an adaptive multi-channel graph convolutional networks for semi-supervised classification (AM-GCN). The central idea is that we extract the specific and common embeddings from node features, topological structures, and their combinations simultaneously, and use the attention mechanism to learn adaptive importance weights of the embeddings. Our extensive experiments on benchmark data sets clearly show that AM-GCN extracts the most correlated information from both node features and topological structures substantially, and improves the classification accuracy with a clear margin.