Geodesic Graph Neural Network for Efficient Graph Representation Learning

Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been applied to graph learning tasks and achieved state-of-the-art results. However, many competitive methods employ preprocessing on the target nodes, such as subgraph extraction and customized labeling, to capture some information that is hard to be learned by normal GNNs. Such operations are time-consuming and do not scale to large graphs. In this paper, we propose an efficient GNN framework called Geodesic GNN (GDGNN). It injects conditional relationships between nodes into the model without labeling. Specifically, we view the shortest paths between two nodes as the spatial graph context of the neighborhood around them. The GNN embeddings of nodes on the shortest paths are used to generate geodesic representations. Conditioned on the geodesic representations, GDGNN is able to generate node, link, and graph representations that carry much richer structural information than plain GNNs. We theoretically prove that GDGNN is more powerful than plain GNNs, and present experimental results to show that GDGNN achieves highly competitive performance with state-of-the-art GNN models on link prediction and graph classification tasks while taking significantly less time.