Data- Free Adversarial Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks

Yuanxin Zhuang*

Lingjuan Lyu

Chuan Shi*

Carl Yang*

Lichao Sun*

* External authors

IJCAI 2022

2022

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in modeling graph structured data, owing to its impressive performance in a wide range of practical applications. Recently, knowledge distillation (KD) for GNNs has enabled remarkable progress in graph model compression and knowledge transfer. However, most of the existing KD methods require a large volume of real data, which are not readily available in practice, and may preclude their applicability in scenarios where the teacher model is trained on rare or hard to acquire datasets. To address this problem, we propose the first end-to-end framework for data-free adversarial knowledge distillation on graph structured data (DFAD-GNN). To be specific, our DFAD-GNN employs a generative adversarial network, which mainly consists of three components: a pre-trained teacher model and a student model are regarded as two discriminators, and a generator is utilized for deriving training graphs to distill knowledge from the teacher model into the student model. Extensive experiments on various benchmark models and six representative datasets demonstrate that our DFAD-GNN significantly surpasses state-of-the-art data-free baselines in the graph classification task.