GNN-based Anchor Embedding for Efficient Subgraph Retrieval
Abstract
Several recent works utilize deep learning (DL) techniques for subgraph retrieval via matching, yet most only return approximate isomorphism relations between queries and data graphs--failing to retrieve all exact matching locations, a critical demand for structured graph retrieval in information retrieval. Unlike these DL-based approximate methods, we propose a learning-based framework for subgraph retrieval, called the graph neural network (GNN)-based anchor embedding framework (GNN-AE), which can efficiently retrieve all exact matching locations. In contrast to most traditional exact subgraph matching methods, which create auxiliary structures online for each query, our method has two core optimizations: (1) We construct offline, one-time-only efficient embedding indices for small feature subgraphs (namely, anchored subgraphs and anchored paths) in the data graph and obtain candidates for the query on these indexed feature subgraphs, trading space for time to reduce online query latency; (2) We leverage GNNs to perform graph isomorphism tests on indexed feature subgraphs and generate low-conflict embeddings for these feature subgraphs, yielding a high-quality, compact set of candidates that further enhances query efficiency. Beyond these core optimizations, we develop a parallel matching growth algorithm and design a cost-based DFS query strategy to retrieve all matching locations. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our GNN-AE for exact subgraph retrieval.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Xiangyu Ke | 77 | 59 Effective and Efficient Community Search with Graph Embeddings (2023) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Empowering Graph-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with Adaptive Awareness Capabilities (2025) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 59 Academic Expert Finding via $(k, \mathcal{P})$-Core based Embedding over Heterogeneous Graphs (2022) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 2 | Tianzhe Zhao | 52 | 62 Context-Aware Commonsense Knowledge Graph Reasoning With Path-Guided Explanations (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 61 Untargeted Adversarial Attack on Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 SAGE: Scale-Aware Gradual Evolution for Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding (2025) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Yankai Chen 0001 | 33 |
Area-chair candidates (2)
| Yankai Chen 0001 assigned | 33 | 6 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 32 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Xiangyu Ke assigned | 77 | 3 | 59 Effective and Efficient Community Search with Graph Embeddings (2023) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Empowering Graph-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with Adaptive Awareness Capabilities (2025) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search |
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| 2 | Ben Liu 0002 | 59 | 3 | 59 Clarified Aggregation and Predictive Modeling (CAPM): High-Interpretability Framework for Inductive Link Prediction (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 UniLP: Unified Topology-aware Generative Framework for Link Prediction in Knowledge Graph (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 3 | Xiaolong Jin 0001 | 59 | 3 | 59 Knowledge Graph Embedding: A Locally and Temporally Adaptive Translation-Based Approach (2018) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Locally Adaptive Translation for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2016) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 4 | Jiapu Wang | 55 | 3 | 59 MADE: Multicurvature Adaptive Embedding for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 TDN: Triplet Distributor Network for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 5 | Xinying Qian | 54 | 3 | 59 Contrast then Memorize: Semantic Neighbor Retrieval-Enhanced Inductive Multimodal Knowledge Graph Completion (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Bring Invariant to Variant: A Contrastive Prompt-based Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 6 | Tianzhe Zhao assigned | 52 | 3 | 62 Context-Aware Commonsense Knowledge Graph Reasoning With Path-Guided Explanations (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 61 Untargeted Adversarial Attack on Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 7 | Fu Zhang 0001 | 47 | 3 | 59 A self-supervised method for learning path-augmented knowledge graph embedding (2025) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Representation Learning of Knowledge Graphs with Multi-scale Capsule Network (2019) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 8 | Qinggang Zhang | 44 | 3 | 59 Logical Reasoning with Relation Network for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Contrastive Knowledge Graph Error Detection (2022) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 9 | Jingtao Zhan | 44 | 3 | 63 Learning Discrete Representations via Constrained Clustering for Effective and Efficient Dense Retrieval (Extended Abstract) (2023) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 63 Learning Discrete Representations via Constrained Clustering for Effective and Efficient Dense Retrieval (Extended Abstract) (2022) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search |
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| 10 | Yu Gu 0016 | 43 | 3 | 59 Relevance Search over Schema-Rich Knowledge Graphs (2019) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 TRAVERS: A Diversity-Based Dynamic Approach to Iterative Relevance Search over Knowledge Graphs (2023) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 11 | Xuhui Sui | 43 | 3 | 59 Multimodal Knowledge Graph Error Detection with Disentanglement VAE and Multi-Grained Triplet Confidence (2025) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Dark Side of Modalities: Reinforced Multimodal Distillation for Multimodal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 12 | Yuzhong Qu | 39 | 3 | 59 Relevance Search over Schema-Rich Knowledge Graphs (2019) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Diversified and Verbalized Result Summarization for Semantic Association Search (2018) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 13 | Armin Toroghi | 39 | 3 | 58 Bayesian Knowledge-driven Critiquing with Indirect Evidence (2023) Conversational Recommendation Systems 58 LogicRec: Recommendation with Users' Logical Requirements (2023) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 14 | Jingwei Cheng | 38 | 3 | 59 A self-supervised method for learning path-augmented knowledge graph embedding (2025) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Representation Learning of Knowledge Graphs with Multi-scale Capsule Network (2019) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 15 | Amir Ingber | 37 | 3 | 65 Bridging Dense and Sparse Maximum Inner Product Search (2024) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 59 Results of the Big ANN: NeurIPS'23 competition (2025) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search |
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| 16 | Jing Zhu 0005 | 37 | 3 | 61 NegatER: Unsupervised Discovery of Negatives in Commonsense Knowledge Bases (2021) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 46 LinkGPT: Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced Link Prediction in Text-Attributed Graphs (2025) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 17 | Bo Wang 0069 | 36 | 3 | 59 Structure-Augmented Text Representation Learning for Efficient Knowledge Graph Completion (2021) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 59 Siamese Pre-Trained Transformer Encoder for Knowledge Base Completion (2021) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 18 | Sebastian Bruch 0001 | 36 | 3 | 65 Pairing Clustered Inverted Indexes with κ-NN Graphs for Fast Approximate Retrieval over Learned Sparse Representations (2024) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 50 Bridging Dense and Sparse Maximum Inner Product Search (2024) Efficient Retrieval and Indexing |
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| 19 | Jurek Leonhardt | 35 | 3 | 37 Efficient Neural Ranking using Forward Indexes (2022) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency 37 Efficient Neural Ranking Using Forward Indexes and Lightweight Encoders (2024) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 20 | Peitian Zhang | 35 | 3 | 50 Hybrid Inverted Index Is a Robust Accelerator for Dense Retrieval (2023) Efficient Retrieval and Indexing 37 Tackling the Length Barrier: Dynamic Context Browsing for Knowledge-Intensive Task (2025) Efficient and Long-Context RAG |
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| 21 | Huiqiang Jiang | 35 | 3 | 37 RetroInfer: A Vector Storage Engine for Scalable Long-Context LLM Inference (2026) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency 37 RetrievalAttention: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Vector Retrieval (2025) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 22 | Sheng-Chieh Lin | 35 | 3 | 67 Efficiently Teaching an Effective Dense Retriever with Balanced Topic Aware Sampling (2021) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 38 One Blade for One Purpose: Advancing Math Information Retrieval using Hybrid Search (2023) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 23 | Franco Maria Nardini | 35 | 3 | 37 ReNeuIR: Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval (2022) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency 37 ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2026: The Fifth Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval (2026) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 24 | Xinyu Ma 0001 | 35 | 3 | 42 Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion 34 Pre-train a Discriminative Text Encoder for Dense Retrieval via Contrastive Span Prediction (2022) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders |
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| 25 | Antonio Mallia | 34 | 3 | 38 Learning Passage Impacts for Inverted Indexes (2021) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency 38 Improved Learned Sparse Retrieval with Corpus-Specific Vocabularies (2024) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 26 | Daiting Shi | 34 | 3 | 63 Learning Discrete Document Representations in Web Search (2023) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 38 Pre-trained Language Model-based Retrieval and Ranking for Web Search (2023) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 27 | Lianghao Xia | 34 | 3 | 60 Knowledge Graph Self-Supervised Rationalization for Recommendation (2023) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 60 DiffKG: Knowledge Graph Diffusion Model for Recommendation (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 28 | Shu Zhou 0002 | 34 | 3 | 35 DynKGRAG: A framework for dynamic knowledge graph construction and multi-hop querying over numerical and textual data (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 34 Why Knowledge Distillation Fails to Scale in Neural Retrieval (2026) Text Embedding and Representation Learning |
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| 29 | Xingyu Tan 0001 | 34 | 3 | 35 PRoH: Dynamic Planning and Reasoning over Knowledge Hypergraphs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG 35 Paths-over-Graph: Knowledge Graph Empowered Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
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| 30 | Jinheon Baek | 34 | 3 | 58 Learning to Extrapolate Knowledge: Transductive Few-shot Out-of-Graph Link Prediction (2020) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 36 Efficient Long Context Language Model Retrieval with Compression (2025) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |