Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Graph kernels are kernel methods measuring graph similarity and serve as a standard tool for graph classification. However, the use of kernel methods for node classification, which is a related problem to graph representation learning, is still ill-posed and the state-of-the-art methods are heavily based on heuristics. Here, we present a novel theoretical kernel-based framework for node classification that can bridge the gap between these two representation learning problems on graphs. Our approach is motivated by graph kernel methodology but extended to learn the node representations capturing the structural information in a graph. We theoretically show that our formulation is as powerful as any positive semidefinite kernels. To efficiently learn the kernel, we propose a novel mechanism for node feature aggregation and a data-driven similarity metric employed during the training phase. More importantly, our framework is flexible and complementary to other graph-based deep learning models, e.g., Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). We empirically evaluate our approach on a number of standard node classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model sets the new state of the art.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

After rebuttal: thank you for the additional experiments. They strengthen the empirical contribution of the paper, so I've increased my score to a 7. ________________ Originality: The paper is a novel combination of known techniques: by reinterpreting the the iterative node aggregation procedure of Kipf et al's GCN as feature smoothing technique, they develop a novel feature mapping function for learning positive semi-definite (psd) graph kernels. The key difference from the Kipf et al approach is they separate the node aggregation and non-linear representation learning components: node features are the output of a multi-layer perceptron and then aggregated once (rather than at every layer) by a multi-hop aggregation function. They argue theoretically that this approach is universal in the sense that it can approximate any invertible psd kernel. Quality: I thought the empirical results of the paper were interesting because they suggest that decoupling the aggregation and representation learning components of GCN-style models leads to better performance (at least on these datasets).

The reviewers were initially positive about the paper but not confident about their opinions. After the author response, a few of their questions were answered, and the discussion led to a consensus that the paper should be a solid contribution to the NeurIPS program.

Graph kernels are kernel methods measuring graph similarity and serve as a standard tool for graph classification. However, the use of kernel methods for node classification, which is a related problem to graph representation learning, is still ill-posed and the state-of-the-art methods are heavily based on heuristics. Here, we present a novel theoretical kernel-based framework for node classification that can bridge the gap between these two representation learning problems on graphs. Our approach is motivated by graph kernel methodology but extended to learn the node representations capturing the structural information in a graph. We theoretically show that our formulation is as powerful as any positive semidefinite kernels.

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has recently drawn much research interest for learning generalizable node representations in a self-supervised manner. In general, the contrastive learning process in GCL is performed on top of the representations learned by a graph neural network (GNN) backbone, which transforms and propagates the node contextual information based on its local neighborhoods. However, nodes sharing similar characteristics may not always be geographically close, which poses a great challenge for unsupervised GCL efforts due to their inherent limitations in capturing such global graph knowledge. In this work, we address their inherent limitations by proposing a simple yet effective framework -- Simple Neural Networks with Structural and Semantic Contrastive Learning} (S^3-CL). Notably, by virtue of the proposed structural and semantic contrastive learning algorithms, even a simple neural network can learn expressive node representations that preserve valuable global structural and semantic patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that the node representations learned by S^3-CL achieve superior performance on different downstream tasks compared with the state-of-the-art unsupervised GCL methods. Implementation and more experimental details are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/kaize0409/S-3-CL.}

Graph kernels are kernel methods measuring graph similarity and serve as a standard tool for graph classification. However, the use of kernel methods for node classification, which is a related problem to graph representation learning, is still ill-posed and the state-of-the-art methods are heavily based on heuristics. Here, we present a novel theoretical kernel-based framework for node classification that can bridge the gap between these two representation learning problems on graphs. Our approach is motivated by graph kernel methodology but extended to learn the node representations capturing the structural information in a graph. We theoretically show that our formulation is as powerful as any positive semidefinite kernels.