Revisiting graph neural networks from hybrid regularized graph signal reconstruction

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown strong graph-structured data processing capabilities. However, most of them are generated based on the message-passing mechanism and lack of the systematic approach to guide their developments. Meanwhile, a unified point of view is hard to explain the design concepts of different GNN models. This paper presents a unified optimization framework from hybrid regularized graph signal reconstruction to establish the connection between the aggregation operations of different GNNs, showing that exploring the optimal solution is the process of GNN information aggregation. We use this new framework to mathematically explain several classic GNN models and summarizes their commonalities and differences from a macro perspective. The proposed framework not only provides convenience to understand GNNs, but also has a guiding significance for the proposal of new GNNs. Moreover, we design a model-driven fixed-point iteration method and a data-driven dictionary learning network according to the corresponding optimization objective and sparse representation. Then the new model, GNN based on model-driven and data-driven (GNN-MD), is established by using alternating iteration methods. We also theoretically analyze its convergence. Numerous node classification experiments on multiple datasets illustrate that the proposed GNN-MD has excellent performance and outperforms all baselines on high-feature-dimension datasets.

Keywords: Graph neural network; Graph signal reconstruction; Regularization; Unfolding network.