Graph convolution networks (GCN) are increasingly popular in many applications, yet remain notoriously hard to train over large graph datasets. They need to compute node representations recursively from their neighbors. Current GCN training algorithms suffer from either high computational costs that grow exponentially with the number of layers, or high memory usage for loading the entire graph and node embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient layer-wise training framework for GCN (L-GCN), that disentangles feature aggregation and feature transformation during training, hence greatly reducing time and memory complexities. We present theoretical analysis for L-GCN under the graph isomorphism framework, that L-GCN leads to as powerful GCNs as the more costly conventional training algorithm does, under mild conditions. We further propose L^2-GCN, which learns a controller for each layer that can automatically adjust the training epochs per layer in L-GCN. Experiments show that L-GCN is faster than state-of-the-arts by at least an order of magnitude, with a consistent of memory usage not dependent on dataset size, while maintaining comparable prediction performance. With the learned controller, L^2-GCN can further cut the training time in half. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Shen-Lab/L2-GCN.

本研究提出了一种高效的图形卷积网络（GCN）训练框架L-GCN，该框架通过在训练期间解耦功能聚合和功能转换，大大降低了时间和内存复杂度，并提出了L²-GCN，用于每个层学习控制器，可以自动调整每个层的训练时期。实验表明，在不依赖于数据集大小的一致内存使用情况下，L-GCN比现有技术快至少一个数量级，同时保持可比的预测性能。

L$^2$-GCN: 图卷积网络的层次和学习有效训练