Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Graph-Structured Prediction

This paper studies graph-structured prediction for supervised learning on graphs with node-wise or edge-wise target dependencies. To solve this problem, recent works investigated combining graph neural networks (GNNs) with conventional structured prediction algorithms like conditional random fields. However, in this work, we pursue an alternative direction building on the recent successes of diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs). That is, we propose a new framework using DPMs to make graph-structured predictions. In the fully supervised setting, our DPM captures the target dependencies by iteratively updating each target estimate based on the estimates of nearby targets. We also propose a variational expectation maximization algorithm to train our DPM in the semi-supervised setting. Extensive experiments verify that our framework consistently outperforms existing neural structured prediction models on inductive and transductive node classification. We also demonstrate the competitive performance of our framework for algorithmic reasoning tasks.