Dynamic Graph Condensation

TL;DR

This paper introduces DyGC, a framework for condensing dynamic graphs to reduce data volume and computational costs while maintaining high performance in graph neural network training.

Contribution

DyGC is the first method to effectively condense dynamic graphs, preserving spatiotemporal features and enabling efficient DGNN training with minimal performance loss.

Findings

Retains up to 96.2% of DGNN performance

Reduces graph size to 0.5% of original

Achieves up to 1846 times training speedup

Abstract

Recent research on deep graph learning has shifted from static to dynamic graphs, motivated by the evolving behaviors observed in complex real-world systems. However, the temporal extension in dynamic graphs poses significant data efficiency challenges, including increased data volume, high spatiotemporal redundancy, and reliance on costly dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs). To alleviate the concerns, we pioneer the study of dynamic graph condensation (DGC), which aims to substantially reduce the scale of dynamic graphs for data-efficient DGNN training. Accordingly, we propose DyGC, a novel framework that condenses the real dynamic graph into a compact version while faithfully preserving the inherent spatiotemporal characteristics. Specifically, to endow synthetic graphs with realistic evolving structures, a novel spiking structure generation mechanism is introduced. It draws on the dynamic behavior of spiking neurons to model temporally-aware connectivity in dynamic graphs. Given the tightly coupled spatiotemporal dependencies, DyGC proposes a tailored distribution matching approach that first constructs a semantically rich state evolving field for dynamic graphs, and then performs fine-grained spatiotemporal state alignment to guide the optimization of the condensed graph. Experiments across multiple dynamic graph datasets and representative DGNN architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of DyGC. Notably, our method retains up to 96.2% DGNN performance with only 0.5% of the original graph size, and achieves up to 1846 times training speedup.