Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network on Semantic Tree

Abstract

The recent past has seen an increasing interest in Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs), since many real-world graphs are heterogeneous in nature, from citation graphs to email graphs. However, existing methods ignore a tree hierarchy among metapaths, naturally constituted by different node types and relation types. In this paper, we present HetTree, a novel HGNN that models both the graph structure and heterogeneous aspects in a scalable and effective manner. Specifically, HetTree builds a semantic tree data structure to capture the hierarchy among metapaths. To effectively encode the semantic tree, HetTree uses a novel subtree attention mechanism to emphasize metapaths that are more helpful in encoding parent-child relationships. Moreover, HetTree proposes carefully matching pre-computed features and labels correspondingly, constituting a complete metapath representation. Our evaluation of HetTree on a variety of real-world datasets demonstrates that it outperforms all existing baselines on open benchmarks and efficiently scales to large real-world graphs with millions of nodes and edges.

Cite

Text

Guan et al. "Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network on Semantic Tree." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025. doi:10.1609/AAAI.V39I16.33860

Markdown

[Guan et al. "Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network on Semantic Tree." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2025/guan2025aaai-heterogeneous/) doi:10.1609/AAAI.V39I16.33860

BibTeX

@inproceedings{guan2025aaai-heterogeneous,
  title     = {{Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network on Semantic Tree}},
  author    = {Guan, Mingyu and Stokes, Jack W. and Luo, Qinlong and Liu, Fuchen and Mehta, Purvanshi and Nouri, Elnaz and Kim, Taesoo},
  booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {2025},
  pages     = {16924-16932},
  doi       = {10.1609/AAAI.V39I16.33860},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2025/guan2025aaai-heterogeneous/}
}