Towards Adaptive Information Fusion in Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have gained great popularity in tackling various analytic tasks on graph and network data. However, some recent studies raise concerns about whether GCNs can optimally integrate node features and topological structures in a complex graph. In this paper, we first present an experimental investigation. Surprisingly, our experimental results clearly show that the capability of the state-of-the-art GCNs in fusing node features and topological structures is distant from optimal or even satisfactory. The weakness may severely hinder the capability of GCNs in some classification tasks, since GCNs may not be able to adaptively learn some deep correlation information between topological structures and node features. Can we remedy the weakness and design a new type of GCNs that can retain the advantages of the state-of-the-art GCNs and, at the same time, enhance the capability of fusing topological structures and node features substantially? We tackle the challenge and propose an Adaptive Multi-channel Graph Convolutional Network for semi-supervised classification (AM-GCN). The central idea is that we extract the specific and common embeddings from node features, topological structures, and their combinations simultaneously, and use the attention mechanism to learn adaptive importance weights of the embeddings. However, considering that the input topology and feature structure in AM-GCN are still predefined and fixed, once the properties of graph structures are not consistent with tasks, the fusion performance of AM-GCN will be hindered from the beginning. Therefore, we need to adjust the structure and further propose the Label Propagation guided Multi-channel Graph Convolutional Network (LPM-GCN). LPM-GCN introduces edge weights learning on both topology and feature spaces to improve structural homophily, which can better promote the fusion process of graph convolutional networks. Our extensive experiments on benchmark data sets clearly show that our proposed models extract the most correlated information from both node features and topological structures substantially, and improves the classification accuracy with a clear margin.