WL-Align: Weisfeiler-Lehman Relabeling for Aligning Users across Networks via Regularized Representation Learning

TL;DR

WL-Align introduces a novel regularized graph representation learning method that leverages Weisfeiler-Lehman relabeling to improve user alignment accuracy across different networks, especially with long-range connectivity.

Contribution

It extends Weisfeiler-Lehman isomorphism testing with a regularized framework combining relabeling and proximity-preserving learning for better network alignment.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in exact matching scenarios

Achieves significant accuracy improvements on real-world datasets

Demonstrates robustness with synthetic data

Abstract

Aligning users across networks using graph representation learning has been found effective where the alignment is accomplished in a low-dimensional embedding space. Yet, achieving highly precise alignment is still challenging, especially when nodes with long-range connectivity to the labeled anchors are encountered. To alleviate this limitation, we purposefully designed WL-Align which adopts a regularized representation learning framework to learn distinctive node representations. It extends the Weisfeiler-Lehman Isormorphism Test and learns the alignment in alternating phases of "across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman relabeling" and "proximity-preserving representation learning". The across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman relabeling is achieved through iterating the anchor-based label propagation and a similarity-based hashing to exploit the known anchors' connectivity to different nodes in an efficient and robust manner. The representation learning module preserves the second-order proximity within individual networks and is regularized by the across-network Weisfeiler-Lehman hash labels. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets have demonstrated that our proposed WL-Align outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant performance improvements in the "exact matching" scenario. Data and code of WL-Align are available at https://github.com/ChenPengGang/WLAlignCode.