arXiv:2506.21682cs.CL2025-06

MLP比GNN更擅长捕捉语言模型的结构信息,无需显式图结构也能提升性能。

Do We Really Need GNNs with Explicit Structural Modeling? MLPs Suffice for Language Model Representations

  • 用可拆解模块评估消息传递与特征变换的独立作用
  • MLP在语法语义任务中表现优于仅依赖消息传递的GNN
  • 适合关注模型效率与结构感知能力的研究者

图神经网络(GNN)被认为能编码显式结构信息,作为辅助知识提升下游NLP任务性能。然而近期研究发现,GNN并未充分使用结构信息,而多层感知机(MLP)虽无消息传递机制,却在结构感知任务中表现出色。本文从信息论角度构建全面探查框架,系统评估显式结构建模对语言模型表示的作用,并探究MLP作为高效可扩展替代方案的潜力。通过扩展传统探查分类器,引入控制模块以选择性使用完整GNN或其解耦组件——消息传递与特征变换操作。该模块化方法分离并评估各操作贡献,避免架构混淆。基于边探查套件(Edge Probing Suite),我们发现:当作为特征变换模块时,MLP在不同架构下均显著提升语言模型表示中的语言知识,有效编码句法与语义模式;包含特征变换的GNN也表现良好;而仅依赖消息传递的模型则普遍表现较差,常导致探查任务性能下降。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Explicit structural information has been proven to be encoded by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), serving as auxiliary knowledge to enhance model capabilities and improve performance in downstream NLP tasks. However, recent studies indicate that GNNs fail to fully utilize structural information, whereas Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), despite lacking the message-passing mechanisms inherent to GNNs, exhibit a surprising ability in structure-aware tasks. Motivated by these findings, this paper introduces a comprehensive probing framework from an information-theoretic perspective. The framework is designed to systematically assess the role of explicit structural modeling in enhancing language model (LM) representations and to investigate the potential of MLPs as efficient and scalable alternatives to GNNs. We extend traditional probing classifiers by incorporating a control module that allows for selective use of either the full GNN model or its decoupled components, specifically, the message-passing and feature-transformation operations.This modular approach isolates and assesses the individual contributions of these operations, avoiding confounding effects from the complete GNN architecture. Using the Edge Probing Suite, a diagnostic tool for evaluating the linguistic knowledge encoded in LMs, we find that MLPs, when used as feature-transformation modules, consistently improve the linguistic knowledge captured in LM representations across different architectures. They effectively encode both syntactic and semantic patterns. Similarly, GNNs that incorporate feature-transformation operations show beneficial effects. In contrast, models that rely solely on message-passing operations tend to underperform, often leading to negative impacts on probing task performance.

GNNMLP语言模型结构感知

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