# Global to Local: Topology-Preserving Adaptive Graph Pooling via Granular-Ball

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04978 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04978/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08804/) (2018)
- [TUDataset: A collection of benchmark datasets for learning with graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08663/) (2020)
- [Graph U-Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05178/) (2019)
- [GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10803/) (2022)
- [Self-Attention Graph Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08082/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02901/) (2017)
- [Diffusion-Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02136/) (2015)
- [Order Matters: Sequence to sequence for sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06391/) (2015)
- [ASAP: Adaptive Structure Aware Pooling for Learning Hierarchical Graph Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07979/) (2019)
- [Accurate Learning of Graph Representations with Graph Multiset Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11533/) (2021)
- [SUGAR: Subgraph Neural Network with Reinforcement Pooling and Self-Supervised Mutual Information Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08170/) (2021)
- [The expressive power of pooling in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01575/) (2023)
- [Geodesic Graph Neural Network for Efficient Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02636/) (2022)
- [Topological Pooling on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14543/) (2023)
- [Boosting Graph Pooling with Persistent Homology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16346/) (2024)
- [Graph Parsing Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14393/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph pooling aims to compress the graph, including both node embeddings and their underlying topological patterns, into a more compact representation. Previous works focus primarily on the overly fine-grained representation of nodes, progressively coarsening the graph by removing nodes or merging them into clusters, thus neglecting the global-to-local patterns and adaptive granularity of the graph's topological structure. In the real scenario, graphs as a whole can be considered the coarsest level of granularity, encapsulating the global topological structure, with progressively finer-grained local topological structures represented from top to bottom. This process continues until the adaptive granularity for each subdomain is reached. To this end, we propose a novel Topology-Preserving Adaptive Graph Pooling (TPAGP) method that dynamically partitions graphs into granular balls by integrating node features and topological information, enabling the generation of multi-granularity representations that effectively capture both local and global structural patterns. Additionally, we design a multi-granularity graph network model that facilitates feature interaction and optimization across different granularities, significantly enhancing performance in graph classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that TPAGP outperforms existing pooling methods across various benchmark datasets, effectively mitigating information loss caused by fixed-granularity strategies.