Continual Graph Learning

Abstract

Various real-world graphs grow with time, necessitating the research of continual graph learning (CGL), which aims to accommodate new tasks over newly emerged graph data while maintaining the model performance over existing tasks.

First, we study the CGL task configurations in different application scenarios and develop a comprehensive Continual Graph Learning Benchmark (CGLB).

CGLB contains comprehensive CGL tasks under various experimental settings, as well as a toolkit for developing CGL techniques.

Second, we developed a series of CGL techniques: 1) Hierarchical Prototype Networks (HPNs), 2) Sparsified Subgraph Memory (SSM), and 3) Subgraph Episodic Memory (SEM).

Hierarchical Prototype Networks (HPNs) is designed to extract basic shareable features and store them into prototypes. In this way, the forgetting problem can be alleviated by knowledge sharing and independently updated prototypes.

Next, SSM is a memory-replay based CGL technique, which stores a set of representative historical data from previous tasks to replay while learning new tasks. While topological information is critical in characterizing graph data, existing memory replay based CGL techniques only store individual nodes for replay and do not consider the topological information due to the memory explosion problem.

To this end, SSM is designed to sparsify the selected computation graphs into fixed size before storing them into the memory.

In this way, we can significantly reduce the memory consumption of a computation subgraph, and for the first time enable GNNs to utilize the explicit topological information for memory replay. Based on SSM, we developed the SEM, which adopts graph Ricci-curvature as the criteria during the computation subgraph sparsification.

Finally, in experiments, we study various real-world graph data including social network, citation network, product co-purchasing network, scene graph, and molecule graphs.