mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Teaching MLPs to Master Heterogeneous Graph-Structured Knowledge for Efficient and Accurate Inference

arXiv 2411.14035 ↗First posted 21 Nov 2024cs.LGcited by 2

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Abstract (arXiv)

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have achieved promising results in various heterogeneous graph learning tasks, owing to their superiority in capturing the intricate relationships and diverse relational semantics inherent in heterogeneous graph structures. However, the neighborhood-fetching latency incurred by structure dependency in HGNNs makes it challenging to deploy for latency-constrained applications that require fast inference. Inspired by recent GNN-to-MLP knowledge distillation frameworks, we introduce HG2M and HG2M+ to combine both HGNN's superior performance and MLP's efficient inference. HG2M directly trains student MLPs with node features as input and soft labels from teacher HGNNs as targets, and HG2M+ further distills reliable and heterogeneous semantic knowledge into student MLPs through reliable node distillation and reliable meta-path distillation. Experiments conducted on six heterogeneous graph datasets show that despite lacking structural dependencies, HG2Ms can still achieve competitive or even better performance than HGNNs and significantly outperform vanilla MLPs. Moreover, HG2Ms demonstrate a 379.24× speedup in inference over HGNNs on the large-scale IGB-3M-19 dataset, showcasing their ability for latency-sensitive deployments.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2024.

Builds on

33 of 51 references.

References · 33

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21 more
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 1.

2 papers.

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  1. 2022SA-MLP: Distilling Graph Knowledge from GNNs into Structure-Aware MLP
  2. 2023Edge-free but Structure-aware: Prototype-Guided Knowledge Distillation from GNNs to MLPs
  3. 2026InfGraND: An Influence-Guided GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation
  4. 2023Unveiling the Unseen Potential of Graph Learning through MLPs: Effective Graph Learners Using Propagation-Embracing MLPs
  5. 2025Learning Accurate, Efficient, and Interpretable MLPs on Multiplex Graphs via Node-wise Multi-View Ensemble Distillation
  6. 2025ProGMLP: A Progressive Framework for GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation with Efficient Trade-offs
  7. 2024Teaching MLP More Graph Information: A Three-stage Multitask Knowledge Distillation Framework
  8. 2023Propagate & Distill: Towards Effective Graph Learners Using Propagation-Embracing MLPs