Abstract:This paper introduces a refined graph encoder embedding method, enhancing the original graph encoder embedding using linear transformation, self-training, and hidden community recovery within observed communities. We provide the theoretical rationale for the refinement procedure, demonstrating how and why our proposed method can effectively identify useful hidden communities via stochastic block models, and how the refinement method leads to improved vertex embedding and better decision boundaries for subsequent vertex classification. The efficacy of our approach is validated through a collection of simulated and real-world graph data.
Abstract:The use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve relevant information from an external knowledge source enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions over private and/or previously unseen document collections. However, RAG fails on global questions directed at an entire text corpus, such as "What are the main themes in the dataset?", since this is inherently a query-focused summarization (QFS) task, rather than an explicit retrieval task. Prior QFS methods, meanwhile, fail to scale to the quantities of text indexed by typical RAG systems. To combine the strengths of these contrasting methods, we propose a Graph RAG approach to question answering over private text corpora that scales with both the generality of user questions and the quantity of source text to be indexed. Our approach uses an LLM to build a graph-based text index in two stages: first to derive an entity knowledge graph from the source documents, then to pregenerate community summaries for all groups of closely-related entities. Given a question, each community summary is used to generate a partial response, before all partial responses are again summarized in a final response to the user. For a class of global sensemaking questions over datasets in the 1 million token range, we show that Graph RAG leads to substantial improvements over a na\"ive RAG baseline for both the comprehensiveness and diversity of generated answers. An open-source, Python-based implementation of both global and local Graph RAG approaches is forthcoming at https://aka.ms/graphrag.
Abstract:The analysis of large-scale time-series network data, such as social media and email communications, remains a significant challenge for graph analysis methodology. In particular, the scalability of graph analysis is a critical issue hindering further progress in large-scale downstream inference. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called "temporal encoder embedding" that can efficiently embed large amounts of graph data with linear complexity. We apply this method to an anonymized time-series communication network from a large organization spanning 2019-2020, consisting of over 100 thousand vertices and 80 million edges. Our method embeds the data within 10 seconds on a standard computer and enables the detection of communication pattern shifts for individual vertices, vertex communities, and the overall graph structure. Through supporting theory and synthesis studies, we demonstrate the theoretical soundness of our approach under random graph models and its numerical effectiveness through simulation studies.
Abstract:In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to multi-graph embedding called graph fusion encoder embedding. The method is designed to work with multiple graphs that share a common vertex set. Under the supervised learning setting, we show that the resulting embedding exhibits a surprising yet highly desirable "synergistic effect": for sufficiently large vertex size, the vertex classification accuracy always benefits from additional graphs. We provide a mathematical proof of this effect under the stochastic block model, and identify the necessary and sufficient condition for asymptotically perfect classification. The simulations and real data experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed method, which consistently outperforms recent benchmark methods in classification.