Gating and Learnable Temperature for Graph Attention Mechanisms

Abstract

Graph attention networks learn neighbor importance through data-dependent coefficients, but standard layers lack explicit control over unreliable feature dimensions and use fixed sharpness of attention coefficient distributions. This paper proposes gated graph attention and learnable temperature for common graph attention mechanisms. Gated graph attention filters feature or message responses to reduce the influence of unreliable dimensions, while learnable temperature dynamically adjusts the sharpness of the attention coefficient distribution. We conduct experiments on five standard node classification benchmarks and five heterophilic benchmarks. On most of these benchmarks, our two modifications improve upon the corresponding graph attention backbones, and combining them can yield further gains. Controlled noise experiments further verify the behavior of the proposed mechanisms under feature perturbations. Theoretical analysis explains these results by showing that gating improves robustness when only part of the feature coordinates are reliable, while temperature is beneficial when global noise weakens the discriminability of node features.