ADC-GNN: Adaptive Dual-level Collaborative Graph Neural Networks for Graph Classification

Abstract

Most existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) rely on the node-level message passing or attention mechanisms to propagate and extract useful information. Although recent advances attempt to move beyond purely the node-level propagation by constructing high-level representations, these approaches are often constrained by pre-computed substructures or unidirectional bottom-up aggregations. Consequently, high-level structural semantics cannot effectively feed back to guide node representation learning, limiting the collaborative optimization between fine-grained features and macroscopic structural semantics. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Adaptive Dual-level Collaborative GNN (ADC-GNN) associated with an adaptive dual-level collaborative mechanism. We commence by introducing a set of global, learnable latent prototypes as high-level semantic references, and then employ a relaxed Sinkhorn algorithm to establish differentiable, non-collapsing assignments between nodes and prototypes. Based on these assignments, the ADC-GNN constructs high-level representations and enables interactions among them. We show that the ADC-GNN can inject the learned high-level information back into the node level, forming a closed-loop, bidirectional optimization process. Experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed ADC-GNN on graph classification.