Papers › SimGNN: A Neural Network Approach to Fast Graph Similarity Computation
SimGNN: A Neural Network Approach to Fast Graph Similarity Computation
Yunsheng Bai, Hao Ding, Song Bian, Ting Chen, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
Graph similarity search is among the most important graph-based applications, e.g. finding the chemical compounds that are most similar to a query compound. Graph similarity computation, such as Graph Edit Distance (GED) and Maximum Common Subgraph (MCS), is the core operation of graph similarity search and many other applications, but very costly to compute in practice. Inspired by the recent success of neural network approaches to several graph applications, such as node or graph classification, we propose a novel neural network based approach to address this classic yet challenging graph problem, aiming to alleviate the computational burden while preserving a good performance. The proposed approach, called SimGNN, combines two strategies. First, we design a learnable embedding function that maps every graph into a vector, which provides a global summary of a graph. A novel attention mechanism is proposed to emphasize the important nodes with respect to a specific similarity metric. Second, we design a pairwise node comparison method to supplement the graph-level embeddings with fine-grained node-level information. Our model achieves better generalization on unseen graphs, and in the worst case runs in quadratic time with respect to the number of nodes in two graphs. Taking GED computation as an example, experimental results on three real graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Specifically, our model achieves smaller error rate and great time reduction compared against a series of baselines, including several approximation algorithms on GED computation, and many existing graph neural network based models. To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to adopt neural networks to explicitly model the similarity between two graphs, and provide a new direction for future research on graph similarity computation and graph similarity search.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graph Similarity | IMDb | SimGNN | mse (10^-3) | 1.264 | #1 of 1 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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