# Schema-Aware Deep Graph Convolutional Networks for Heterogeneous Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.00644 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00644/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (2020)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (2019)
- [MAGNN: Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network for Heterogeneous Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01680/) (2020)
- [GaAN: Gated Attention Networks for Learning on Large and Spatiotemporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07294/) (2018)
- [Break the Ceiling: Stronger Multi-scale Deep Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02174/) (2019)
- [STAR-GCN: Stacked and Reconstructed Graph Convolutional Networks for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13129/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TEA: A Sequential Recommendation Framework via Temporally Evolving Aggregations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07378/) (2021)
- [Tri-Learn Graph Fusion Network for Attributed Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13620/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph convolutional network (GCN) based approaches have achieved significant progress for solving complex, graph-structured problems. GCNs incorporate the graph structure information and the node (or edge) features through message passing and computes 'deep' node representations. Despite significant progress in the field, designing GCN architectures for heterogeneous graphs still remains an open challenge. Due to the schema of a heterogeneous graph, useful information may reside multiple hops away. A key question is how to perform message passing to incorporate information of neighbors multiple hops away while avoiding the well-known over-smoothing problem in GCNs. To address this question, we propose our GCN framework 'Deep Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (DHGCN)', which takes advantage of the schema of a heterogeneous graph and uses a hierarchical approach to effectively utilize information many hops away. It first computes representations of the target nodes based on their 'schema-derived ego-network' (SEN). It then links the nodes of the same type with various pre-defined metapaths and performs message passing along these links to compute final node representations. Our design choices naturally capture the way a heterogeneous graph is generated from the schema. The experimental results on real and synthetic datasets corroborate the design choice and illustrate the performance gains relative to competing alternatives.