machine learning

Structure-Feature Aligned Graph Learning via Alternating Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2607.11577

summary

The paper proposes a two‑view framework that aligns GNN embeddings with a structure‑free feature prior learned by an anchor network, and introduces a channel‑split adaptive gated GNN that balances spectral smoothing and spatial discrimination via node‑wise gating, solved with a cyclic alternating optimization scheme.

Abstract

We introduce a constrained two-view framework for node prediction that aligns structure-conditioned GNN embeddings with a structure-free feature prior learned by an anchor model. Conventional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) couple feature transformation and neighborhood aggregation, which renders them vulnerable to topology noise and heterophilous connections. To decouple this dependency, our framework utilizes an independent anchor network to capture intrinsic attribute features via a self-supervised reconstruction objective. Furthermore, we propose a Channel-Split Adaptive Gated GNN (CSAG-GNN) that dynamically routes representations between global spectral smoothing and local spatial discrimination through a node-wise gating mechanism. We propose a stable cyclic alternating optimization strategy to solve the resulting coupled bi-level objective, preventing mutual representation drift during training. Empirical results on both homophilous and heterophilous benchmarks show balanced performance gains and structural robustness over competitive baselines.

Topics & keywords

#graph neural networks#node prediction#heterophily#bi-level optimization#gated architectures#feature priorsGNNanchor modelself-supervised reconstructionchannel-split adaptive gated GNNalternating optimizationspectral smoothing