Graph inductive biases in transformers without message passing

Conference item

Transformers for graph data are increasingly widely studied and successful in numerous learning tasks. Graph inductive biases are crucial for Graph Transformers, and previous works incorporate them using message-passing modules and/or positional encodings. However, Graph Transformers that use message-passing inherit known issues of message-passing, and differ significantly from Transformers used in other domains, thus making transfer of research advances more difficult. On the other hand, Graph Transformers without message-passing often perform poorly on smaller datasets, where inductive biases are more important. To bridge this gap, we propose the Graph Inductive bias Transformer (GRIT) — a new Graph Transformer that incorporates graph inductive biases without using message passing. GRIT is based on several architectural changes that are each theoretically and empirically justified, including: learned relative positional encodings initialized with random walk probabilities, a flexible attention mechanism that updates node and node-pair representations, and injection of degree information in each layer. We prove that GRIT is expressive — it can express shortest path distances and various graph propagation matrices. GRIT achieves state-of-the-art empirical performance across a variety of graph datasets, thus showing the power that Graph Transformers without message-passing can deliver.

Authors: Ma, L; Lin, C; Lim, D; Romero-Soriano, A; Dokania, PK

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research
• Host title: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning
• Volume: 202
• Pages: 23321-23337
• Publication date: 2023-07-03
• Acceptance date: 2023-04-24
• Event title: 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023)
• Event location: Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Event website: https://icml.cc/Conferences/2023
• Event start date: 2023-07-23
• Event end date: 2023-07-29
• ISSN: 2640-3498
• Language: English