Inkstream: Instantaneous GNN Inference on Dynamic Graphs via Incremental Update
Dan Wu, Zhaoying Li, Tulika Mitra · 2025
Graph Neural Network (GNN) on dynamic graphs that evolve with time necessitates constant updates. Current approaches aim to mitigate computational costs by limiting updates to the affected areas, essentially the$k$-hop neighborhood surrounding modified edges/vertices in$k$-layer GNNs. However, we identified that these strategies often involve unnecessary computation: (1) Within the$k$-hop neighborhood, a substantial number of nodes remain unaffected by changes in edges/vertices when GNN employs max or min as its aggregation function; (2) For certain model architectures, the node embeddings can be incrementally updated with minimal memory access and computation. In response to these observations, we developed InkStream, an innovative and general method for real-time GNN inference by avoiding unnecessary updates, significantly reducing inference time and energy cost. InkStream supports all common GNN aggregation functions while imposing minimal constraints on model architecture. It is grounded in the principle of minimalistic propagation and data retrieval, employing an event-based system to manage both the inter-layer propagation of effects and the intra-layer incremental updates of node embeddings. Additionally, InkStream offers remarkable extensibility and ease of configuration, making it adaptable to evolving GNN model structures. Our evaluation across three GNN models on six graph datasets reveals that InkStream significantly accelerates inference time from hours to mere milliseconds. The code is available at https://github.com/WuDan0399/InkStream.