AMPNet: Attention as Message Passing for Graph Neural Networks

Feature-level interactions between nodes can carry crucial information for understanding complex interactions in graph-structured data. Current interpretability techniques, however, are limited in their ability to capture feature-level interactions between different nodes. In this work, we propose AMPNet, a general Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture for uncovering feature-level interactions between different spatial locations within graph-structured data. Our framework applies a multiheaded attention operation during message-passing to contextualize messages based on the feature interactions between different nodes. We evaluate AMPNet on several benchmark and real-world datasets, and develop a synthetic benchmark based on cyclic cellular automata to test the ability of our framework to recover cyclic patterns in node states based on feature-interactions. We also propose several methods for addressing the scalability of our architecture to large graphs, including subgraph sampling during training and node feature downsampling.