{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/clustering-with-total-variation-graph-neural","title":"Total Variation Graph Neural Networks","arxiv_id":"2211.06218","date":"2022-11-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jonas Berg Hansen","Filippo Maria Bianchi"],"abstract":"Recently proposed Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for vertex clustering are trained with an unsupervised minimum cut objective, approximated by a Spectral Clustering (SC) relaxation. However, the SC relaxation is loose and, while it offers a closed-form solution, it also yields overly smooth cluster assignments that poorly separate the vertices. In this paper, we propose a GNN model that computes cluster assignments by optimizing a tighter relaxation of the minimum cut based on graph total variation (GTV). The cluster assignments can be used directly to perform vertex clustering or to implement graph pooling in a graph classification framework. Our model consists of two core components: i) a message-passing layer that minimizes the $\\ell_1$ distance in the features of adjacent vertices, which is key to achieving sharp transitions between clusters; ii) an unsupervised loss function that minimizes the GTV of the cluster assignments while ensuring balanced partitions. Experimental results show that our model outperforms other GNNs for vertex clustering and graph classification.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06218v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.06218v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"clustering-with-total-variation-graph-neural","repo_url":"https://github.com/filippomb/total-variation-graph-neural-networks","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"},{"task_slug":"graph-classification","task_name":"Graph Classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"spectral-clustering","method_name":"Spectral Clustering"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2211.06218","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}