普通Transformer稍作修改就能高效处理图数据,性能媲美复杂模型。
Plain Transformers Can be Powerful Graph Learners
- 用简化L2注意力、自适应归一化和MLP位置编码改进原始Transformer
- 在多个图数据集上表现优于子图GNN和高阶GNN等复杂模型
- 适合希望统一语言、视觉与图学习框架的研究者使用
Transformers 在多种模态中表现出色,主要得益于其简洁而强大的缩放点积注意力机制。尽管研究者尝试将Transformer迁移到图学习领域,但多数先进的图Transformer(GTs)已偏离原始架构,通过引入消息传递或复杂注意力机制实现,这阻碍了其他领域训练技术的迁移。本文表明,原始的Transformer架构本身即可成为强大的图学习器。为此,我们对原始Transformer提出三项简单、最小且易实现的改进:(1) 使用简化的L2注意力衡量标记间的幅度相似性;(2) 采用自适应均方根归一化以保留标记幅度信息;(3) 使用简单的MLP作为图的位置编码。在图表达能力的实证基准测试中,该模型展现出显著的实际表达能力,优于更复杂的子图GNN和高阶GNN。其在多种图数据集上的表现也验证了模型的有效性。这一发现凸显了原始Transformer架构的多功能性,强调其作为跨语言、视觉与图领域的统一骨干网络的巨大潜力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Transformers have attained outstanding performance across various modalities, owing to their simple but powerful scaled-dot-product (SDP) attention mechanisms. Researchers have attempted to migrate Transformers to graph learning, but most advanced Graph Transformers (GTs) have strayed far from plain Transformers, exhibiting major architectural differences either by integrating message-passing or incorporating sophisticated attention mechanisms. These divergences hinder the easy adoption of training advances for Transformers developed in other domains. Contrary to previous GTs, this work demonstrates that the plain Transformer architecture can be a powerful graph learner. To achieve this, we propose to incorporate three simple, minimal, and easy-to-implement modifications to the plain Transformer architecture to construct our Powerful Plain Graph Transformers (PPGT): (1) simplified $L_2$ attention for measuring the magnitude closeness among tokens; (2) adaptive root-mean-square normalization to preserve token magnitude information; and (3) a simple MLP-based stem for graph positional encoding. Consistent with its theoretical expressivity, PPGT demonstrates noteworthy realized expressivity on the empirical graph expressivity benchmark, comparing favorably to more complicated alternatives such as subgraph GNNs and higher-order GNNs. Its empirical performance across various graph datasets also justifies the effectiveness of PPGT. This finding underscores the versatility of plain Transformer architectures and highlights their strong potential as a unified backbone for multimodal learning across language, vision, and graph domains.
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