Auto-GNAS: A Parallel Graph Neural Architecture Search Framework

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have received much attention as GNNs have recently been successfully applied on non-euclidean data. However, artificially designed graph neural networks often fail to get satisfactory model performance for a given graph data. Graph neural architecture search effectively constructs the GNNs that achieve the expected model performance with the rise of automatic machine learning. The challenge is efficiently and automatically getting the optimal GNN architecture in a vast search space. Existing search methods serially evaluate the GNN architectures, severely limiting system efficiency. To solve these problems, we develop an Automatic Graph Neural Architecture Search framework (Auto-GNAS) with parallel estimation to implement an automatic graph neural search process that requires almost no manual intervention. In Auto-GNAS, we design the search algorithm with multiple genetic searchers. Each searcher can simultaneously use evaluation feedback information, information entropy, and search results from other searchers based on sharing mechanism to improve the search efficiency. As far as we know, this is the first work using parallel computing to improve the system efficiency of graph neural architecture search. According to the experiment on the real datasets, Auto-GNAS obtain competitive model performance and better search efficiency than other search algorithms. Since the parallel estimation ability of Auto-GNAS is independent of search algorithms, we expand different search algorithms based on Auto-GNAS for scalability experiments. The results show that Auto-GNAS with varying search algorithms can achieve nearly linear acceleration with the increase of computing resources.