Graph Decoupling Attention Markov Networks for Semi-supervised Graph Node Classification

Graph neural networks (GNN) have been ubiquitous in graph learning tasks such as node classification. Most of GNN methods update the node embedding iteratively by aggregating its neighbors' information. However, they often suffer from negative disturbance, due to edges connecting nodes with different labels. One approach to alleviate this negative disturbance is to use attention, but current attention always considers feature similarity and suffers from the lack of supervision. In this paper, we consider the label dependency of graph nodes and propose a decoupling attention mechanism to learn both hard and soft attention. The hard attention is learned on labels for a refined graph structure with fewer inter-class edges. Its purpose is to reduce the aggregation's negative disturbance. The soft attention is learned on features maximizing the information gain by message passing over better graph structures. Moreover, the learned attention guides the label propagation and the feature propagation. Extensive experiments are performed on five well-known benchmark graph datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.