ALGNN: Auto-Designed Lightweight Graph Neural Network

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used on graph-structured data, and its research has made substantial progress in recent years. However, given the various number of choices and combinations of components such as aggregator and activation function, designing GNNs for specific tasks is very heavy manual work. Recently, neural architecture search (NAS) was proposed with the aim of automating the GNN design process and generating task-dependent architectures. While existing approaches have achieved competitive performance, they are not well suited to practical application scenarios where the computational budget is limited. In this paper, we propose an auto-designed lightweight graph neural network (ALGNN) method to automatically design lightweight, task-dependent GNN architectures. ALGNN uses multi-objective optimization to optimize the architecture constrained by the computation cost and complexity of the model. We define, for the first time, an evaluation standard for consumption cost with the analysis of the message passing process in GNNs. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that ALGNN can generate a lightweight GNN model that has much fewer parameters and GPU hours, meanwhile has comparable performance with state-of-the-art approaches.