Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in graph representation learning and various sampling approaches have been proposed to scale GNNs to applications with large-scale graphs. A class of promising GNN training algorithms take advantage of historical embeddings to reduce the computation and memory cost while maintaining the model expressiveness of GNNs. However, they incur significant computation bias due to the stale feature history. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of their staleness and inferior performance on large-scale problems. Motivated by our discoveries, we propose a simple yet highly effective training algorithm (REST) to effectively reduce feature staleness, which leads to significantly improved performance and convergence across varying batch sizes, especially when staleness is predominant. The proposed algorithm seamlessly integrates with existing solutions, boasting easy implementation, while comprehensive experiments underscore its superior performance and efficiency on large-scale benchmarks. Specifically, our improvements to state-of-the-art historical embedding methods result in a 2.7\% and 3.6\% performance enhancement on the ogbn-papers100M and ogbn-products dataset respectively, accompanied by notably accelerated convergence. The code can be found at https://github.com/RXPHD/REST.

Learning from Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has attracted significant attention due to its wide range of real-world applications. The rapid evolution of language models (LMs) has revolutionized the way we process textual data, which indicates a strong potential to replace shallow text embedding generally used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, we find that existing LM approaches that exploit text information in graphs suffer from inferior computation and data efficiency. In this study, we introduce LEADING, a novel and efficient approach for end-to-end fine-tuning of language models on TAGs. To enhance data efficiency, LEADING efficiently transfers rich knowledge from LMs to downstream graph learning tasks with limited labeled data by employing end-to-end training of LMs and GNNs in a semi-supervised learning setting. To address associated computation efficiency issues, it introduces two techniques: neighbor decoupling targeting LMs and implicit graph modeling targeting GNNs, respectively. Our proposed approach demonstrates superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the ogbn-arxiv leaderboard, while maintaining computation cost and memory overhead comparable to graph-less fine-tuning of LMs. Through comprehensive experiments, we showcase its superior computation and data efficiency, presenting a promising solution for various LMs and graph learning tasks on TAGs.

In an era of information explosion, recommender systems are vital tools to deliver personalized recommendations for users. The key of recommender systems is to forecast users' future behaviors based on previous user-item interactions. Due to their strong expressive power of capturing high-order connectivities in user-item interaction data, recent years have witnessed a rising interest in leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to boost the prediction performance of recommender systems. Nonetheless, classic Matrix Factorization (MF) and Deep Neural Network (DNN) approaches still play an important role in real-world large-scale recommender systems due to their scalability advantages. Despite the existence of GNN-acceleration solutions, it remains an open question whether GNN-based recommender systems can scale as efficiently as classic MF and DNN methods. In this paper, we propose a Linear-Time Graph Neural Network (LTGNN) to scale up GNN-based recommender systems to achieve comparable scalability as classic MF approaches while maintaining GNNs' powerful expressiveness for superior prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are presented to validate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed algorithm. Our implementation based on PyTorch is available.

Recent works have demonstrated the benefits of capturing long-distance dependency in graphs by deeper graph neural networks (GNNs). But deeper GNNs suffer from the long-lasting scalability challenge due to the neighborhood explosion problem in large-scale graphs. In this work, we propose to capture long-distance dependency in graphs by shallower models instead of deeper models, which leads to a much more efficient model, LazyGNN, for graph representation learning. Moreover, we demonstrate that LazyGNN is compatible with existing scalable approaches (such as sampling methods) for further accelerations through the development of mini-batch LazyGNN. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate its superior prediction performance and scalability on large-scale benchmarks. The implementation of LazyGNN is available at https: //github.com/RXPHD/Lazy_GNN.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention in recent years due to their ability to model complex relationships between entities in graph-structured data such as social networks, protein structures, and knowledge graphs. However, due to the size of real-world industrial graphs and the special architecture of GNNs, it is a long-lasting challenge for engineers and researchers to deploy GNNs on large-scale graphs, which significantly limits their applications in real-world applications. In this tutorial, we will cover the fundamental scalability challenges of GNNs, frontiers of large-scale GNNs including classic approaches and some newly emerging techniques, the evaluation and comparison of scalable GNNs, and their large-scale real-world applications. Overall, this tutorial aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive understanding of the challenges and state-of-the-art techniques for scaling GNNs. The summary and discussion on future directions will inspire engineers and researchers to explore new ideas and developments in this rapidly evolving field. The website of this tutorial is available at https://sites.google.com/ncsu.edu/gnnkdd2023tutorial.