# Hierarchical Attention Models for Multi-Relational Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09365 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09365/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [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)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Embedding Entities and Relations for Learning and Inference in Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6575/) (2014)
- [Complex Embeddings for Simple Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06357/) (2016)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Convolutional 2D Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01476/) (2017)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [Holographic Embeddings of Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.04935/) (2015)

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

- [Focus Where It Matters: Graph Selective State Focused Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15849/) (2024)
- [SLM-Conditioned Hierarchical Relation Routing for Labeled Property Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26132/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Bi-Level Attention-Based Relational Graph Convolutional Networks (BR-GCN), unique neural network architectures that utilize masked self-attentional layers with relational graph convolutions, to effectively operate on highly multi-relational data. BR-GCN models use bi-level attention to learn node embeddings through (1) node-level attention, and (2) relation-level attention. The node-level self-attentional layers use intra-relational graph interactions to learn relation-specific node embeddings using a weighted aggregation of neighborhood features in a sparse subgraph region. The relation-level self-attentional layers use inter-relational graph interactions to learn the final node embeddings using a weighted aggregation of relation-specific node embeddings. The BR-GCN bi-level attention mechanism extends Transformer-based multiplicative attention from the natural language processing (NLP) domain, and Graph Attention Networks (GAT)-based attention, to large-scale heterogeneous graphs (HGs). On node classification, BR-GCN outperforms baselines from 0.29% to 14.95% as a stand-alone model, and on link prediction, BR-GCN outperforms baselines from 0.02% to 7.40% as an auto-encoder model. We also conduct ablation studies to evaluate the quality of BR-GCN's relation-level attention and discuss how its learning of graph structure may be transferred to enrich other graph neural networks (GNNs). Through various experiments, we show that BR-GCN's attention mechanism is both scalable and more effective in learning compared to state-of-the-art GNNs.