# SHGNN: Structure-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06244 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06244/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03578/) (2015)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (2020)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)
- [Interaction Networks for Learning about Objects, Relations and Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00222/) (2016)
- [Do Transformers Really Perform Bad for Graph Representation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05234/) (2021)
- [MAGNN: Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network for Heterogeneous Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01680/) (2020)
- [Diffusion-Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02136/) (2015)
- [struc2vec: Learning Node Representations from Structural Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03165/) (2017)
- [GaAN: Gated Attention Networks for Learning on Large and Spatiotemporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07294/) (2018)
- [Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10730/) (2017)
- [Graph-Structured Representations for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05600/) (2016)
- [Graph-Based Reasoning over Heterogeneous External Knowledge for Commonsense Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05311/) (2019)
- [An Efficient Neighborhood-based Interaction Model for Recommendation on Heterogeneous Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00216/) (2020)
- [IntentGC: a Scalable Graph Convolution Framework Fusing Heterogeneous Information for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12377/) (2019)
- [Complex Factoid Question Answering with a Free-Text Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12876/) (2021)
- [Meta-Path Guided Embedding for Similarity Search in Large-Scale Heterogeneous Information Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09769/) (2016)
- [SEEK: Segmented Embedding of Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00856/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [HAGNN: Hybrid Aggregation for Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01636/) (2023)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network on Semantic Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13496/) (2024)
- [Improving Pattern Recognition of Scheduling Anomalies through Structure-Aware and Semantically-Enhanced Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18673/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many real-world graphs (networks) are heterogeneous with different types of nodes and edges. Heterogeneous graph embedding, aiming at learning the low-dimensional node representations of a heterogeneous graph, is vital for various downstream applications. Many meta-path based embedding methods have been proposed to learn the semantic information of heterogeneous graphs in recent years. However, most of the existing techniques overlook the graph structure information when learning the heterogeneous graph embeddings. This paper proposes a novel Structure-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (SHGNN) to address the above limitations. In detail, we first utilize a feature propagation module to capture the local structure information of intermediate nodes in the meta-path. Next, we use a tree-attention aggregator to incorporate the graph structure information into the aggregation module on the meta-path. Finally, we leverage a meta-path aggregator to fuse the information aggregated from different meta-paths. We conducted experiments on node classification and clustering tasks and achieved state-of-the-art results on the benchmark datasets, which shows the effectiveness of our proposed method.