Deep learning has revolutionized many machine learning tasks in recent years, ranging from image classification and video processing to speech recognition and natural language understanding. The data in these tasks are typically represented in the Euclidean space. However, there is an increasing number of applications, where data are generated from non-Euclidean domains and are represented as graphs with complex relationships and interdependency between objects. The complexity of graph data has imposed significant challenges on the existing machine learning algorithms. Recently, many studies on extending deep learning approaches for graph data have emerged. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in data mining and machine learning fields. We propose a new taxonomy to divide the state-of-the-art GNNs into four categories, namely, recurrent GNNs, convolutional GNNs, graph autoencoders, and spatial–temporal GNNs. We further discuss the applications of GNNs across various domains and summarize the open-source codes, benchmark data sets, and model evaluation of GNNs. Finally, we propose potential research directions in this rapidly growing field.

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A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks

Lots of learning tasks require dealing with graph data which contains rich relation information among elements. Modeling physics systems, learning molecular fingerprints, predicting protein interface, and classifying diseases demand a model to learn from graph inputs. In other domains such as learning from non-structural data like texts and images, reasoning on extracted structures (like the dependency trees of sentences and the scene graphs of images) is an important research topic which also needs graph reasoning models. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are neural models that capture the dependence of graphs via message passing between the nodes of graphs. In recent years, variants of GNNs such as graph convolutional network (GCN), graph attention network (GAT), graph recurrent network (GRN) have demonstrated ground-breaking performances on many deep learning tasks. In this survey, we propose a general design pipeline for GNN models and discuss the variants of each component, systematically categorize the applications, and propose four open problems for future research.

Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications

Learning vector representations (aka. embeddings) of users and items lies at the core of modern recommender systems. Ranging from early matrix factorization to recently emerged deep learning based methods, existing efforts typically obtain a user's (or an item's) embedding by mapping from pre-existing features that describe the user (or the item), such as ID and attributes. We argue that an inherent drawback of such methods is that, the collaborative signal, which is latent in user-item interactions, is not encoded in the embedding process. As such, the resultant embeddings may not be sufficient to capture the collaborative filtering effect. In this work, we propose to integrate the user-item interactions - more specifically the bipartite graph structure - into the embedding process. We develop a new recommendation framework Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering (NGCF), which exploits the user-item graph structure by propagating embeddings on it. This leads to the expressive modeling of high-order connectivity in user-item graph, effectively injecting the collaborative signal into the embedding process in an explicit manner. We conduct extensive experiments on three public benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements over several state-of-the-art models like HOP-Rec [39] and Collaborative Memory Network [5]. Further analysis verifies the importance of embedding propagation for learning better user and item representations, justifying the rationality and effectiveness of NGCF. Codes are available at https://github.com/xiangwang1223/neural_graph_collaborative_filtering.

Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which can naturally integrate node information and topological structure, have been demonstrated to be powerful in learning on graph data. These advantages of GNNs provide great potential to advance social recommendation since data in social recommender systems can be represented as user-user social graph and user-item graph; and learning latent factors of users and items is the key. However, building social recommender systems based on GNNs faces challenges. For example, the user-item graph encodes both interactions and their associated opinions; social relations have heterogeneous strengths; users involve in two graphs (e.g., the user-user social graph and the user-item graph). To address the three aforementioned challenges simultaneously, in this paper, we present a novel graph neural network framework (GraphRec) for social recommendations. In particular, we provide a principled approach to jointly capture interactions and opinions in the user-item graph and propose the framework GraphRec, which coherently models two graphs and heterogeneous strengths. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework GraphRec.

/pdf/graph-neural-networks-for-social-recommendation-2idqjfhe2l.pdf

Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommendation

Recent advancements in deep neural networks for graph-structured data have led to state-of-the-art performance on recommender system benchmarks. However, making these methods practical and scalable to web-scale recommendation tasks with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users remains an unsolved challenge. Here we describe a large-scale deep recommendation engine that we developed and deployed at Pinterest. We develop a data-efficient Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) algorithm, which combines efficient random walks and graph convolutions to generate embeddings of nodes (i.e., items) that incorporate both graph structure as well as node feature information. Compared to prior GCN approaches, we develop a novel method based on highly efficient random walks to structure the convolutions and design a novel training strategy that relies on harder-and-harder training examples to improve robustness and convergence of the model. We also develop an efficient MapReduce model inference algorithm to generate embeddings using a trained model. Overall, we can train on and embed graphs that are four orders of magnitude larger than typical GCN implementations. We show how GCN embeddings can be used to make high-quality recommendations in various settings at Pinterest, which has a massive underlying graph with 3 billion nodes representing pins and boards, and 17 billion edges. According to offline metrics, user studies, as well as A/B tests, our approach generates higher-quality recommendations than comparable deep learning based systems. To our knowledge, this is by far the largest application of deep graph embeddings to date and paves the way for a new generation of web-scale recommender systems based on graph convolutional architectures.

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems

Recent advancements in deep neural networks for graph-structured data have led to state-of-the-art performance on recommender system benchmarks. However, making these methods practical and scalable to web-scale recommendation tasks with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users remains a challenge. Here we describe a large-scale deep recommendation engine that we developed and deployed at Pinterest. We develop a data-efficient Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) algorithm PinSage, which combines efficient random walks and graph convolutions to generate embeddings of nodes (i.e., items) that incorporate both graph structure as well as node feature information. Compared to prior GCN approaches, we develop a novel method based on highly efficient random walks to structure the convolutions and design a novel training strategy that relies on harder-and-harder training examples to improve robustness and convergence of the model. We also develop an efficient MapReduce model inference algorithm to generate embeddings using a trained model. We deploy PinSage at Pinterest and train it on 7.5 billion examples on a graph with 3 billion nodes representing pins and boards, and 18 billion edges. According to offline metrics, user studies and A/B tests, PinSage generates higher-quality recommendations than comparable deep learning and graph-based alternatives. To our knowledge, this is the largest application of deep graph embeddings to date and paves the way for a new generation of web-scale recommender systems based on graph convolutional architectures.

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems.

Recommender systems that can learn from cross-session data to dynamically predict the next item a user will choose are crucial for online platforms. However, existing approaches often use out-of-the-box sequence models which are limited by speed and memory consumption, are often infeasible for production environments, and usually do not incorporate cross-session information, which is crucial for effective recommendations. Here we propose Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Networks (HierTCN), a hierarchical deep learning architecture that makes dynamic recommendations based on users' sequential multi-session interactions with items. HierTCN is designed for web-scale systems with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users. It consists of two levels of models: The high-level model uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to aggregate users' evolving long-term interests across different sessions, while the low-level model is implemented with Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), utilizing both the long-term interests and the short-term interactions within sessions to predict the next interaction. We conduct extensive experiments on a public XING dataset and a large-scale Pinterest dataset that contains 6 million users with 1.6 billion interactions. We show that HierTCN is 2.5x faster than RNN-based models and uses 90% less data memory compared to TCN-based models. We further develop an effective data caching scheme and a queue-based mini-batch generator, enabling our model to be trained within 24 hours on a single GPU. Our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic recommendation methods, with up to 18% improvement in recall and 10% in mean reciprocal rank.

Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Recommender Systems

Sequential models that encode user activity for next action prediction have become a popular design choice for building web-scale personalized recommendation systems. Traditional methods of sequential recommendation either utilize end-to-end learning on realtime user actions, or learn user representations separately in an offline batch-generated manner. This paper (1) presents Pinterest's ranking architecture for Homefeed, our personalized recommendation product and the largest engagement surface; (2) proposes TransAct, a sequential model that extracts users' short-term preferences from their realtime activities; (3) describes our hybrid approach to ranking, which combines end-to-end sequential modeling via TransAct with batch-generated user embeddings. The hybrid approach allows us to combine the advantages of responsiveness from learning directly on realtime user activity with the cost-effectiveness of batch user representations learned over a longer time period. We describe the results of ablation studies, the challenges we faced during productionization, and the outcome of an online A/B experiment, which validates the effectiveness of our hybrid ranking model. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of TransAct on other surfaces such as contextual recommendations and search. Our model has been deployed to production in Homefeed, Related Pins, Notifications, and Search at Pinterest.

Pong Eksombatchai

Papers

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems.

Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Recommender Systems

Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Recommender Systems

TransAct: Transformer-based Realtime User Action Model for Recommendation at Pinterest