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Vincent Létourneau

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Supervisor

Publications

Graph Positional and Structural Encoder
Semih Cantürk
Renming Liu
Olivier Lapointe-Gagné
Vincent Létourneau
Ladislav Rampášek
Positional and structural encodings (PSE) enable better identifiability of nodes within a graph, as in general graphs lack a canonical node … (see more)ordering. This renders PSEs essential tools for empowering modern GNNs, and in particular graph Transformers. However, designing PSEs that work optimally for a variety of graph prediction tasks is a challenging and unsolved problem. Here, we present the graph positional and structural encoder (GPSE), a first-ever attempt to train a graph encoder that captures rich PSE representations for augmenting any GNN. GPSE can effectively learn a common latent representation for multiple PSEs, and is highly transferable. The encoder trained on a particular graph dataset can be used effectively on datasets drawn from significantly different distributions and even modalities. We show that across a wide range of benchmarks, GPSE-enhanced models can significantly improve the performance in certain tasks, while performing on par with those that employ explicitly computed PSEs in other cases. Our results pave the way for the development of large pre-trained models for extracting graph positional and structural information and highlight their potential as a viable alternative to explicitly computed PSEs as well as to existing self-supervised pre-training approaches.
Directional Graph Networks
Saro Passaro
Vincent Létourneau
William Hamilton
Gabriele Corso
Pietro Lio
The lack of anisotropic kernels in graph neural networks (GNNs) strongly limits their expressiveness, contributing to well-known issues such… (see more) as over-smoothing. To overcome this limitation, we propose the first globally consistent anisotropic kernels for GNNs, allowing for graph convolutions that are defined according to topologicaly-derived directional flows. First, by defining a vector field in the graph, we develop a method of applying directional derivatives and smoothing by projecting node-specific messages into the field. Then, we propose the use of the Laplacian eigenvectors as such vector field. We show that the method generalizes CNNs on an
Rethinking Graph Transformers with Spectral Attention
Devin Kreuzer
William Hamilton
Vincent Létourneau
Prudencio Tossou
In recent years, the Transformer architecture has proven to be very successful in sequence processing, but its application to other data str… (see more)uctures, such as graphs, has remained limited due to the difficulty of properly defining positions. Here, we present the