A Universal Subhypergraph-Assisted Embedding Framework for Both Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Networks
S.C. Mo, Xiangyi Teng, Kai Wu, Jing Liu, Kaixin Yuan · IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering · 2025
In real-world scenarios, most complex systems can be generally modelled as homogenous or heterogenous networks. Therefore, downstream tasks (e.g., node/graph classification, node clustering) based on these two types of graphs become ubiquitous and have drawn considerable attentions in recent years. Existing literatures on node classification mainly focuses on either homogeneous or heterogeneous graphs, while research on effectively carrying out node classification tasks on both types of graphs simultaneously still under-exploited. To fill this gap, we propose a universal Graph Neural Network architecture based on Subgraph and Subhypergraph (SS-GNN) with feature-enhanced strategy for node embedding on both homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs. Through construction of subgraph and subhypergraph with same-class nodes, our model can simultaneously deal with homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs. Graph attention modules are especially designed to embed subgraphs of same-class nodes to learn the internal topological structure and local community structure within the original graph. Additionally, to capture high-order features of graph and enhance the embedding representations of nodes, we also utilize hypergraph attention modules to embed subhypergraphs of same-class nodes. Unlike other approaches that rely on pre-defined meta-paths, our model can be readily applied to most real-world applications without requiring any domain knowledge. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three homogeneous and three heterogeneous real-world graphs to demonstrate the effectiveness of SS-GNN. The experimental results for node classification and clustering tasks not only show the superior performance of our proposed model compared to state-of-the-art, but also demonstrate its potentially good interpretability for graph analysis. This work may provide some enlightening insights to the study on universality of graph foundation model.