Papers › Residual Gated Graph ConvNets

Residual Gated Graph ConvNets

20 Nov 2017ICLR 2018 1arXiv:1711.07553archive 2025-07-28

Xavier Bresson, Thomas Laurent

Graph-structured data such as social networks, functional brain networks, gene regulatory networks, communications networks have brought the interest in generalizing deep learning techniques to graph domains. In this paper, we are interested to design neural networks for graphs with variable length in order to solve learning problems such as vertex classification, graph classification, graph regression, and graph generative tasks. Most existing works have focused on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to learn meaningful representations of graphs, and more recently new convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have been introduced. In this work, we want to compare rigorously these two fundamental families of architectures to solve graph learning tasks. We review existing graph RNN and ConvNet architectures, and propose natural extension of LSTM and ConvNet to graphs with arbitrary size. Then, we design a set of analytically controlled experiments on two basic graph problems, i.e. subgraph matching and graph clustering, to test the different architectures. Numerical results show that the proposed graph ConvNets are 3-17% more accurate and 1.5-4x faster than graph RNNs. Graph ConvNets are also 36% more accurate than variational (non-learning) techniques. Finally, the most effective graph ConvNet architecture uses gated edges and residuality. Residuality plays an essential role to learn multi-layer architectures as they provide a 10% gain of performance.

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xbresson/spatial_graph_convnets mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

ClusteringGeneral ClassificationGraph ClassificationGraph ClusteringGraph LearningGraph RegressionNode Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Graph Classification CIFAR10 100k GatedGCN Accuracy (%) 69.37 #14 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Graph Regression ZINC-500k GatedGCN MAE 0.282 #30 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Node Classification PATTERN 100k GatedGCN Accuracy (%) 84.480 #7 of 9 Archive leaderboard report

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