# Graph neural network distillation

Area: [Knowledge distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/distill/graph-neural-network-distillation/

## Key facts

- Graph neural network distillation: 98 papers on arXiv since 2021 (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- 31 of its 98 mapped papers (32%) cite “Extract the Knowledge of Graph Neural Networks and Go Beyond it: An Effective Knowledge Distillation Framework” (2021, arXiv 2103.02885).
- 17 of its 98 mapped papers (17%) cite “On Representation Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks” (2021, arXiv 2111.04964).
- 1 new papers 25 Sep–14 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [Extract the Knowledge of Graph Neural Networks and Go Beyond it: An Effective Knowledge Distillation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02885/) (2021), cited by 31 papers here
- [On Representation Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04964/) (2021), cited by 17 papers here
- [Graph-Free Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07519/) (2021), cited by 16 papers here
- [Compressing Deep Graph Neural Networks via Adversarial Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11678/) (2022), cited by 11 papers here
- [SA-MLP: Distilling Graph Knowledge from GNNs into Structure-Aware MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09609/) (2022), cited by 9 papers here
- [FreeKD: Free-direction Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06561/) (2022), cited by 8 papers here
- [Knowledge Distillation on Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00219/) (2023), cited by 8 papers here
- [Quantifying the Knowledge in GNNs for Reliable Distillation into MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05628/) (2023), cited by 8 papers here
- [Multi-task Self-distillation for Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01174/) (2021), cited by 6 papers here
- [Boosting Graph Neural Networks via Adaptive Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05920/) (2022), cited by 5 papers here

## New (25 Sep–14 Oct)

- [Distilling Graph Geometry: Knowledge Gap from GNNs to MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10520/) (2026-10-07)