# RAFEN -- Regularized Alignment Framework for Embeddings of Nodes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01926/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [dyngraph2vec: Capturing Network Dynamics using Dynamic Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02657/) (2018)
- [Towards Backward-Compatible Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11942/) (2020)
- [Node Embedding over Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08889/) (2019)
- [Learning Compatible Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01958/) (2021)
- [Learning Backward Compatible Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03040/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning representations of nodes has been a crucial area of the graph machine learning research area. A well-defined node embedding model should reflect both node features and the graph structure in the final embedding. In the case of dynamic graphs, this problem becomes even more complex as both features and structure may change over time. The embeddings of particular nodes should remain comparable during the evolution of the graph, what can be achieved by applying an alignment procedure. This step was often applied in existing works after the node embedding was already computed. In this paper, we introduce a framework -- RAFEN -- that allows to enrich any existing node embedding method using the aforementioned alignment term and learning aligned node embedding during training time. We propose several variants of our framework and demonstrate its performance on six real-world datasets. RAFEN achieves on-par or better performance than existing approaches without requiring additional processing steps.