Augmenting Message Passing by Retrieving Similar Graphs

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are effective tools for graph representation learning. Most GNNs rely on a recursive neighborhood aggregation scheme, named message passing. In this paper, motivated by the success of retrieval-based models, we propose a non-parametric scheme called GraphRetrieval, in which similar training graphs associated with their ground-truth labels are retrieved to be jointly utilized with the input graph representation to complete various graph-based predictive tasks. In particular, we take a well-trained model with its parameters fixed and then we add an adapter based on self-attention with only a few trainable parameters per task to explicitly learn the interaction between an input graph and its retrieved similar graphs. Our experiments on 12 different datasets involving different tasks (classification and regression) show that GraphRetrieval is able to achieve substantial improvements on all twelve datasets compared to three strong GNN baseline models. Our work demonstrates that GraphRetrieval is a promising augmentation for message passing.