Deep Learning on Graphs: A Data-Centric Exploration

Many learning tasks in Artificial Intelligence (AI) require dealing with graph data, ranging from biology and chemistry to finance and education. As powerful deep learning tools for graphs, graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various graph-related applications. Despite the significant accomplishments of GNNs, recent studies have highlighted that their efficiency and effectiveness face significant challenges such as adversarial robustness and scalability, which are fundamentally linked to data. While major attention has been devoted to improving GNNs from the model perspective, the potential of directly enhancing data has often been overlooked. It underscores a critical gap in GNN research---while model improvements are undoubtedly important, we also need to recognize and address the data-related factors contributing to the challenges. Hence, my research is to investigate solutions for these challenges from the data perspective, employing strategies such as data characterization, reduction, augmentation, transformation, and detection.