Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) conduct message passing which aggregates local neighbors to update node representations. Such message passing leads to scalability issues in practical latency-constrained applications. To address this issue, recent methods adopt knowledge distillation (KD) to learn computationally-efficient multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by mimicking the output of GNN. However, the existing GNN representation space may not be expressive enough for representing diverse local structures of the underlying graph, which limits the knowledge transfer from GNN to MLP. Here we present a novel framework VQGraph to learn a powerful graph representation space for bridging GNNs and MLPs. We adopt the encoder of a variant of a vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) as a structure-aware graph tokenizer, which explicitly represents the nodes of diverse local structures as numerous discrete tokens and constitutes a meaningful codebook. Equipped with the learned codebook, we propose a new token-based distillation objective based on soft token assignments to sufficiently transfer the structural knowledge from GNN to MLP. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the strong performance of VQGraph, where we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on GNN-MLP distillation in both transductive and inductive settings across seven graph datasets. We show that VQGraph with better performance infers faster than GNNs by 828x, and also achieves accuracy improvement over GNNs and stand-alone MLPs by 3.90% and 28.05% on average, respectively. Code: https://github.com/YangLing0818/VQGraph.

通过使用结构感知的图标记器和基于软标记分配的基于令牌的蒸馏目标函数，VQGraph构建了一个功能强大的图表示空间，从而在GNN和MLP之间进行了知识传递，并在多个图数据集上实现了新的最好性能，分别提高了828倍的推理速度和3.90%和28.05%的准确率。

VQGraph：用于连接GNNs和MLPs的图向量量化