GraIP: A Benchmarking Framework For Neural Graph Inverse Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces GraIP, a unifying framework for graph inverse problems that formalizes various graph learning tasks as inverse problems, providing benchmarks and evaluating baseline methods to advance structural learning.

Contribution

The paper proposes the GraIP framework, formalizing diverse graph inverse problems, and introduces benchmark datasets and metrics for evaluation.

Findings

Demonstrates GraIP's versatility across multiple tasks.

Provides benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics.

Empirically evaluates baseline methods.

Abstract

A wide range of graph learning tasks, such as structure discovery, temporal graph analysis, and combinatorial optimization, focus on inferring graph structures from data, rather than making predictions on given graphs. However, the respective methods to solve such problems are often developed in an isolated, task-specific manner and thus lack a unifying theoretical foundation. Here, we provide a stepping stone towards the formation of such a foundation and further development by introducing the Neural Graph Inverse Problem (GraIP) conceptual framework, which formalizes and reframes a broad class of graph learning tasks as inverse problems. Unlike discriminative approaches that directly predict target variables from given graph inputs, the GraIP paradigm addresses inverse problems, i.e., it relies on observational data and aims to recover the underlying graph structure by reversing the forward process, such as message passing or network dynamics, that produced the observed outputs. We demonstrate the versatility of GraIP across various graph learning tasks, including rewiring, causal discovery, and neural relational inference. We also propose benchmark datasets and metrics for each GraIP domain considered, and characterize and empirically evaluate existing baseline methods used to solve them. Overall, our unifying perspective bridges seemingly disparate applications and provides a principled approach to structural learning in constrained and combinatorial settings while encouraging cross-pollination of existing methods across graph inverse problems.