Compressing deep graph convolution network with multi-staged knowledge distillation

Junghun Kim, Jinhong Jung, U. Kang, Yuchen Qiu
2021 PLoS ONE  
Given a trained deep graph convolution network (GCN), how can we effectively compress it into a compact network without significant loss of accuracy? Compressing a trained deep GCN into a compact GCN is of great importance for implementing the model to environments such as mobile or embedded systems, which have limited computing resources. However, previous works for compressing deep GCNs do not consider the multi-hop aggregation of the deep GCNs, though it is the main purpose for their
more » ... GCN layers. In this work, we propose MustaD (Multi-staged knowledge Distillation), a novel approach for compressing deep GCNs to single-layered GCNs through multi-staged knowledge distillation (KD). MustaD distills the knowledge of 1) the aggregation from multiple GCN layers as well as 2) task prediction while preserving the multi-hop feature aggregation of deep GCNs by a single effective layer. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that MustaD provides the state-of-the-art performance compared to other KD based methods. Specifically, MustaD presents up to 4.21%p improvement of accuracy compared to the second-best KD models.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0256187 pmid:34388224 pmcid:PMC8363007 fatcat:cv75gwtcnfbc7luszqgvqpcpqm