Heterogeneous graph neural networks (GNNs) have been successful in handling heterogeneous graphs. In existing heterogeneous GNNs, meta-path plays an essential role. However, recent work pointed out that simple homogeneous graph model without meta-path can also achieve comparable results, which calls into question the necessity of meta-path. In this paper, we first present the intrinsic difference about meta-path-based and meta-path-free models, i.e., how to select neighbors for node aggregation. Then, we propose a novel framework to utilize the rich type semantic information in heterogeneous graphs comprehensively, namely HAGNN (Hybrid Aggregation for Heterogeneous GNNs). The core of HAGNN is to leverage the meta-path neighbors and the directly connected neighbors simultaneously for node aggregations. HAGNN divides the overall aggregation process into two phases: meta-path-based intra-type aggregation and meta-path-free inter-type aggregation. During the intra-type aggregation phase, we propose a new data structure called fused meta-path graph and perform structural semantic aware aggregation on it. Finally, we combine the embeddings generated by each phase. Compared with existing heterogeneous GNN models, HAGNN can take full advantage of the heterogeneity in heterogeneous graphs. Extensive experimental results on node classification, node clustering, and link prediction tasks show that HAGNN outperforms the existing modes, demonstrating the effectiveness of HAGNN.

本文提出了一种新的框架，名为HAGNN（Hybrid Aggregation for Heterogeneous GNNs），可以同时利用元路径邻居和直接相连邻居进行节点聚合来充分利用异构图中的异质性，通过在自身内部对齐和外部对齐两个阶段分别聚合结构语义信息和类型语义信息，获得了优于现有异构GNN模型的效果。

HAGNN：异构图神经网络的混合聚合算法