Bi-GCN: Binary Graph Convolutional Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in graph representation learning. Unfortunately, current GNNs usually rely on loading the entire attributed graph into the network for processing. This implicit assumption may not be satisfied with limited memory resources, especially when the attributed graph is large. In this paper, we propose a Binary Graph Convolutional Network (Bi-GCN), which binarizes both the network parameters and input node features. Besides, the original matrix multiplications are revised to binary operations for accelerations. According to the theoretical analysis, our Bi-GCN can reduce the memory consumption by ~31x for both the network parameters and input data, and accelerate the inference speed by ~53x. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our Bi-GCN can give a comparable prediction performance compared to the full-precision baselines. Besides, our binarization approach can be easily applied to other GNNs, which has been verified in the experiments.