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arXiv · 2206.06561

FreeKD: Free-direction Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks

Kaituo Feng·Changsheng Li·Ye Yuan·Guoren Wang
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Abstract

Knowledge distillation (KD) has demonstrated its effectiveness to boost the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs), where its goal is to distill knowledge from a deeper teacher GNN into a shallower student GNN. However, it is actually difficult to train a satisfactory teacher GNN due to the well-known over-parametrized and over-smoothing issues, leading to invalid knowledge transfer in practical applications. In this paper, we propose the first Free-direction Knowledge Distillation framework via Reinforcement learning for GNNs, called FreeKD, which is no longer required to provide a deeper well-optimized teacher GNN. The core idea of our work is to collaboratively build two shallower GNNs in an effort to exchange knowledge between them via reinforcement learning in a hierarchical way. As we observe that one typical GNN model often has better and worse performances at different nodes during training, we devise a dynamic and free-direction knowledge transfer strategy that consists of two levels of actions: 1) node-level action determines the directions of knowledge transfer between the corresponding nodes of two networks; and then 2) structure-level action determines which of the local structures generated by the node-level actions to be propagated. In essence, our FreeKD is a general and principled framework which can be naturally compatible with GNNs of different architectures. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate our FreeKD outperforms two base GNNs in a large margin, and shows its efficacy to various GNNs. More surprisingly, our FreeKD has comparable or even better performance than traditional KD algorithms that distill knowledge from a deeper and stronger teacher GNN.

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Kaituo Feng, Changsheng Li, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang. 2023-03-27. FreeKD: Free-direction Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks. https://doi.org/10.1145/3534678.3539320

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