Unsupervised Graph Neural Architecture Search with Disentangled Self-supervision
Abstract
The existing graph neural architecture search (GNAS) methods heavily rely on supervised labels during the search process, failing to handle ubiquitous scenarios where supervisions are not available. In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised graph neural architecture search, which remains unexplored in the literature. The key problem is to discover the latent graph factors that drive the formation of graph data as well as the underlying relations between the factors and the optimal neural architectures. Handling this problem is challenging given that the latent graph factors together with architectures are highly entangled due to the nature of the graph and the complexity of the neural architecture search process. To address the challenge, we propose a novel Disentangled Self-supervised Graph Neural Architecture Search (DSGAS) model, which is able to discover the optimal architectures capturing various latent graph factors in a self-supervised fashion based on unlabeled graph data. Specifically, we first design a disentangled graph super-network capable of incorporating multiple architectures with factor-wise disentanglement, which are optimized simultaneously. Then, we estimate the performance of architectures under different factors by our proposed self-supervised training with joint architecture-graph disentanglement. Finally, we propose a contrastive search with architecture augmentations to discover architectures with factor-specific expertise. Extensive experiments on 11 real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed DSGAS model is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance against several baseline methods in an unsupervised manner.
Benchmark Results
Tested on 4 datasets 13 baseline values reported too low
Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).
Classic
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GraphTARIF | 0.9703
±0.0019 | |
| 2 | GAT | 0.9669
±0.0014 best reported | |
| 3 | GAT+T | 0.9660
±0.0007 | |
| 7 | SAGE | 0.9643
±0.0027 | |
| 8 | GCN | 0.9632
±0.0008 best reported | |
| 56 | GraphSAGE | 0.9508
±0.0026 best reported | best at pub: A Quasi-Wasserstein Loss for Learning Graph Neural Networks (WWW 2023) |
| 177 | DSGAS | 0.9330
±0.0030 | This paper |
| 290 | Random | 0.9244
±0.0002 best reported | best at pub: NAS-Bench-Graph: Benchmarking Graph Neural Architecture Search (NeurIPS 2022) |
| 328 | GIN | 0.9211
±0.0032 best reported | best at pub: Union Subgraph Neural Networks (AAAI 2023) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 341 | GASSO | 0.9200
±0.0030 | This paper |
| 372 | GraphConv | 0.9150
±0.0050 | This paper |
| 373 | DARTS | 0.9150
±0.0060 | This paper |
| 390 | MLP | 0.9128
±0.0063 best reported | best at pub: Clarify Confused Nodes via Separated Learning (2023) |
| 468 | GraphNAS | 0.8930
±0.0070 | This paper |
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GraphTARIF | 0.9461
±0.0017 | |
| 2 | GCN | 0.9412
±0.0008 | |
| 3 | GAT | 0.9398
±0.0022 | |
| 8 | SAGE | 0.9351
±0.0006 | |
| 266 | DSGAS | 0.8660
±0.0040 | This paper |
| 313 | GASSO | 0.8490
±0.0040 | This paper |
| 320 | MLP | 0.8463 | |
| 477 | GraphNAS | 0.6900
±0.0060 | This paper |
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GrokFormer | 0.9831
±0.0018 | |
| 2 | PolyFormer | 0.9808
±0.0027 | |
| 3 | SGFormer | 0.9796
±0.0081 | |
| 6 | GAT | 0.9782
±0.0028 best reported | best at pub: Clarify Confused Nodes via Separated Learning (2023) best today: GrokFormer: Graph Fourier Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformers (ICML 2024) |
| 9 | GCN | 0.9774
±0.0035 best reported | best at pub: SelfGNN: Self-supervised Graph Neural Networks without explicit negative sampling (WWW 2021) best today: GrokFormer: Graph Fourier Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformers (ICML 2024) |
| 17 | SAGE | 0.9739
±0.0018 | |
| 43 | GraphSAGE | 0.9649
±0.0006 best reported | best at pub: Polynormer: Polynomial-Expressive Graph Transformer in Linear Time (ICLR 2024) |
| 58 | MLP | 0.9597
±0.0007 best reported | best at pub: Clarify Confused Nodes via Separated Learning (2023) |
| 86 | DSGAS | 0.9570
±0.0010 | This paper |
| 85 | GASSO | 0.9570
±0.0010 | This paper |
| 126 | Random | 0.9540
±0.0010 | prev best: NAS-Bench-Graph: Benchmarking Graph Neural Architecture Search (NeurIPS 2022) |
| 137 | GIN | 0.9530
±0.0010 | prev best: Learning Graph Augmentations to Learn Graph Representations (2022) Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted. |
| 138 | GraphConv | 0.9530
±0.0010 | This paper |
| 145 | DARTS | 0.9520
±0.0010 | This paper |
| 175 | GraphNAS | 0.9450
±0.0010 | This paper |
TU Dortmund
| # | Model | Accuracy ↑ | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MSH-GNN | 0.9910
±0.0030 | |
| 2 | ID-GNN+BEC | 0.9830
±0.0360 | |
| 3 | SupCosine | 0.9830
±0.0250 | |
| 39 | GIN | 0.9330
±0.0290 best reported | best at pub: ProtGNN: Towards Self-Explaining Graph Neural Networks (AAAI 2021) |
| 63 | GCN | 0.9220
±0.0440 best reported | best at pub: Breaking the Limits of Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (ICML 2021) best today: Depth-Adaptive Graph Neural Networks via Learnable Bakry-Émery Curvature (KDD 2025) |
| 158 | GraphSAGE | 0.9040
±0.0780 best reported | best at pub: Asynchronous Neural Networks for Learning in Graphs (2022) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 183 | GAT | 0.9010
±0.0580 best reported | best at pub: Breaking the Limits of Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (ICML 2021) best today: The Expressive Power of Graph Neural Networks: A Survey (2023) |
| 297 | DSGAS | 0.8870
±0.0070 | This paper |
| 380 | GraphConv | 0.8720
±0.0140 | This paper |
| 403 | MLP | 0.8660
±0.0495 best reported | best at pub: Breaking the Limits of Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (ICML 2021) |
| 405 | DARTS | 0.8650
±0.0230 | This paper |
| 485 | PAS | 0.8400
±0.0160 | This paper |
| 535 | Random | 0.8270
±0.0680 best reported | best at pub: AutoGL: A Library for Automated Graph Learning (ICLR 2021) Difference within reported uncertainty; not counted as underperformance. |
| 674 | GraphNAS | 0.7750
±0.0070 | This paper |
| 718 | SAGE | 0.7490
±0.0870 |
