A Centrality-Based Graph Learning Framework

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become powerful models for both node- and graph-level tasks. While node-level learning focuses on individual nodes and their local structures, graph-level learning encounters challenges in capturing the global properties of graphs. In this paper, we conduct a theoretical and experimental analysis of existing graph-level learning frameworks and find that these frameworks typically adopt a single-view perspective based solely on node degree, which limits their ability to capture comprehensive graph characteristics. To address these issues, we propose a multi-view approach that leverages different types of centrality measures to capture diverse aspects of graph structure. We design an attention-based mechanism to adaptively integrate these multiple views, and use it as a readout function to perform weighted summation of node embeddings, termed as Adaptive Centrality Readout (ACRead). ACRead demonstrates enhanced flexibility and effectiveness when integrated with various GNN architectures, outperforming state-of-the-art readout methods, including KerRead and Set Transformer. Additionally, this multi-view centrality approach can serve as a standalone graph-level learning framework without relying on GNNs, referred to as Adaptive Centrality-based Graph Learning (ACGL), which achieves competitive performance by effectively combining different centrality perspectives.