Papers › Ranking Structured Objects with Graph Neural Networks

Ranking Structured Objects with Graph Neural Networks

18 Apr 2021arXiv:2104.08869archive 2025-07-28

Clemens Damke, Eyke Hüllermeier

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been successfully applied in many structured data domains, with applications ranging from molecular property prediction to the analysis of social networks. Motivated by the broad applicability of GNNs, we propose the family of so-called RankGNNs, a combination of neural Learning to Rank (LtR) methods and GNNs. RankGNNs are trained with a set of pair-wise preferences between graphs, suggesting that one of them is preferred over the other. One practical application of this problem is drug screening, where an expert wants to find the most promising molecules in a large collection of drug candidates. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed pair-wise RankGNN approach either significantly outperforms or at least matches the ranking performance of the naive point-wise baseline approach, in which the LtR problem is solved via GNN-based graph regression.

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Tasks

Graph RankingGraph RegressionLearning-To-RankMolecular Property PredictionProperty Prediction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Graph Ranking ZINC 2-WL-GNN + DirectRanker Kendall's Tau 0.894 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ZINC 2-WL-GNN + CmpNN Kendall's Tau 0.873 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ZINC 2-WL-GNN + Rank Regression Kendall's Tau 0.810 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ZINC 2-WL-GNN + Utility Regression Kendall's Tau 0.803 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-molesol 2-WL-GNN + CmpNN Kendall's Tau 0.718 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-molesol 2-WL-GNN + Rank Regression Kendall's Tau 0.720 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-molesol 2-WL-GNN + DirectRanker Kendall's Tau 0.745 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-molesol 2-WL-GNN + Utility Regression Kendall's Tau 0.747 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-molfreesolv 2-WL-GNN + Utility Regression Kendall's Tau 0.379 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-molfreesolv 2-WL-GNN + Rank Regression Kendall's Tau 0.524 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-molfreesolv 2-WL-GNN + DirectRanker Kendall's Tau 0.525 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-molfreesolv 2-WL-GNN + CmpNN Kendall's Tau 0.527 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-mollipo 2-WL-GNN + Utility Regression Kendall's Tau 0.318 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-mollipo 2-WL-GNN + Rank Regression Kendall's Tau 0.332 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-mollipo 2-WL-GNN + CmpNN Kendall's Tau 0.503 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Ranking ogbg-mollipo 2-WL-GNN + DirectRanker Kendall's Tau 0.505 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

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