Ising on the Graph: Task-specific Graph Subsampling via the Ising Model

Reducing a graph while preserving its overall structure is an important problem with many applications. Typically, the reduction approaches either remove edges (sparsification) or merge nodes (coarsening) in an unsupervised way with no specific downstream task in mind. In this paper, we present an approach for subsampling graph structures using an Ising model defined on either the nodes or edges and learning the external magnetic field of the Ising model using a graph neural network. Our approach is task-specific as it can learn how to reduce a graph for a specific downstream task in an end-to-end fashion. The utilized loss function of the task does not even have to be differentiable. We showcase the versatility of our approach on three distinct applications: image segmentation, 3D shape sparsification, and sparse approximate matrix inverse determination.