# Residual Gated Graph ConvNets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07553 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07553/

## Key facts

- Cited by 346 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 346)

- [Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12454/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Graph Transformers with Spectral Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03893/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks with Learnable Structural and Positional Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07875/) (2021)
- [Do Transformers Really Perform Bad for Graph Representation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05234/) (2021)
- [Combinatorial optimization and reasoning with graph neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09544/) (2021)
- [Long Range Graph Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08164/) (2022)
- [Weisfeiler and Lehman Go Cellular: CW Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12575/) (2021)
- [Identity-aware Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10320/) (2021)
- [Sign and Basis Invariant Networks for Spectral Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13013/) (2022)
- [Exphormer: Sparse Transformers for Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06147/) (2023)
- [On Over-Squashing in Message Passing Neural Networks: The Impact of Width, Depth, and Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02941/) (2023)
- [Graph Inductive Biases in Transformers without Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17589/) (2023)
- [Graph-Mamba: Towards Long-Range Graph Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00789/) (2024)
- [Graph-Coupled Oscillator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02296/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Expressive Power of GNNs via Graph Biconnectivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09505/) (2023)
- [Global Self-Attention as a Replacement for Graph Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03348/) (2021)
- [NeuroLKH: Combining Deep Learning Model with Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun Heuristic for Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07983/) (2021)
- [Breaking the Limits of Message Passing Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04319/) (2021)
- [PhyCRNet: Physics-informed Convolutional-Recurrent Network for Solving Spatiotemporal PDEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14103/) (2021)
- [A Generalization of ViT/MLP-Mixer to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13350/) (2022)
- [Topological Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07835/) (2021)
- [Graph Mamba: Towards Learning on Graphs with State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08678/) (2024)
- [Where Did the Gap Go? Reassessing the Long-Range Graph Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00367/) (2023)
- [Classic GNNs are Strong Baselines: Reassessing GNNs for Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08993/) (2024)
- [Learning Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based AU Relation Graph for Facial Action Unit Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01782/) (2022)
- [DRew: Dynamically Rewired Message Passing with Delay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08018/) (2023)
- [GRPE: Relative Positional Encoding for Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12787/) (2022)
- [Towards Omni-generalizable Neural Methods for Vehicle Routing Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19587/) (2023)
- [Understanding convolution on graphs via energies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10991/) (2022)
- [Your Transformer May Not be as Powerful as You Expect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13401/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph-structured data such as social networks, functional brain networks, gene regulatory networks, communications networks have brought the interest in generalizing deep learning techniques to graph domains. In this paper, we are interested to design neural networks for graphs with variable length in order to solve learning problems such as vertex classification, graph classification, graph regression, and graph generative tasks. Most existing works have focused on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to learn meaningful representations of graphs, and more recently new convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have been introduced. In this work, we want to compare rigorously these two fundamental families of architectures to solve graph learning tasks. We review existing graph RNN and ConvNet architectures, and propose natural extension of LSTM and ConvNet to graphs with arbitrary size. Then, we design a set of analytically controlled experiments on two basic graph problems, i.e. subgraph matching and graph clustering, to test the different architectures. Numerical results show that the proposed graph ConvNets are 3-17% more accurate and 1.5-4x faster than graph RNNs. Graph ConvNets are also 36% more accurate than variational (non-learning) techniques. Finally, the most effective graph ConvNet architecture uses gated edges and residuality. Residuality plays an essential role to learn multi-layer architectures as they provide a 10% gain of performance.