AttPool: Towards Hierarchical Feature Representation in Graph Convolutional Networks via Attention Mechanism

Abstract

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are potentially short of the ability to learn hierarchical representation for graph embedding, which holds them back in the graph classification task. Here, we propose AttPool, which is a novel graph pooling module based on attention mechanism, to remedy the problem. It is able to select nodes that are significant for graph representation adaptively, and generate hierarchical features via aggregating the attention-weighted information in nodes. Additionally, we devise a hierarchical prediction architecture to sufficiently leverage the hierarchical representation and facilitate the model learning. The AttPool module together with the entire training structure can be integrated into existing GCNs, and is trained in an end-to-end fashion conveniently. The experimental results on several graph-classification benchmark datasets with various scales demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.