Amalgamating Knowledge from Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks

In this paper, we study a novel knowledge transfer task in the domain of graph neural networks (GNNs). We strive to train a multi-talented student GNN, without accessing human annotations, that “amalgamates” knowledge from a couple of teacher GNNs with heterogeneous architectures and handling distinct tasks. The student derived in this way is expected to integrate the expertise from both teachers while maintaining a compact architecture. To this end, we propose an innovative approach to train a slimmable GNN that enables learning from teachers with varying feature dimensions. Meanwhile, to explicitly align topological semantics between the student and teachers, we introduce a topological attribution map (TAM) to highlight the structural saliency in a graph, based on which the student imitates the teachers’ ways of aggregating information from neighbors. Experiments on seven datasets across various tasks, including multi-label classification and joint segmentation-classification, demonstrate that the learned student, with a lightweight architecture, achieves gratifying results on par with and sometimes even superior to those of the teachers in their specializations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ycjing/AmalgamateGNN.PyTorch.