Compressing deep graph convolution network with multi-staged knowledge distillation

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 16; no. 8; p. e0256187
• Main Authors: Kim, Junghun, Jung, Jinhong, Kang, U
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 13.08.2021; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Accuracy; Agglomeration; Biology and Life Sciences; Compressing; Computer Graphics - statistics & numerical data; Convolution; Datasets as Topic; Distillation; Embedded systems; Engineering and Technology; Graphic methods; Humans; Knowledge; Knowledge Bases; Learning; Management; Methods; Neural Networks, Computer; People and Places; Physical Sciences; Research and Analysis Methods; Social Sciences; South Korea
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256187

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 multiple 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.