IGNN-Solver: A Graph Neural Solver for Implicit Graph Neural Networks

Lin, Junchao, Ling, Zenan, Feng, Zhanbo, Zhou, Feng, Xu, Jingwen, Qiu, Robert C

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Implicit graph neural networks (IGNNs), which exhibit strong expressive power with a single layer, have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in capturing long-range dependencies (LRD) in underlying graphs while effectively mitigating the over-smoothing problem. However, IGNNs rely on computationally expensive fixed-point iterations, which lead to significant speed and scalability limitations, hindering their application to large-scale graphs. To achieve fast fixedpoint solving for IGNNs, we propose a novel graph neural solver, IGNN-Solver, which leverages the generalized Anderson Acceleration method, parameterized by a small GNN, and learns iterative updates as a graph-dependent temporal process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the IGNN-Solver significantly accelerates inference, achieving a 1.5 to 8 speedup without sacrificing accuracy. Moreover, this advantage becomes increasingly pronounced as the graph scale grows, facilitating its large-scale deployment in real-world applications. Implicit graph neural networks (IGNNs) [20; 33; 7] have emerged as a significant advancement in graph learning frameworks. Unlike traditional graph neural networks (GNNs) that stack multiple explicit layers, IGNNs utilize a single implicit layer formulated as a fixed-point equation. The solution to this fixed-point equation, known as the equilibrium, is equivalent to the output obtained by iterating an explicit layer infinitely. This allows an implicit layer to access infinite hops of neighbors, providing IGNNs with global receptive fields within just one layer [12].