IGRP: Iterative Gradient Rank Pruning for Finding Graph Lottery Ticket

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising performance in many applications, yet remain extremely difficult to train over large-scale graph datasets. Existing weight pruning techniques can prune out the layer weights; however, they cannot fully address the high computation complexity of GNN inference, caused by large graph size and complicated node connections. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Gradient Rank Pruning (IGRP) algorithm to find graph lottery tickets (GLT) of GNNs where each GLT includes a pruned adjacency matrix and a sub-network. Our IGRP can avoid layer collapse and the winning ticket achieves Maximal critical compression. We evaluate the proposed method on small-scale (Cora and Citeseer), medium-scale (PubMed and Wiki-CS), and large-scale (Ogbn-ArXiv and Ogbn-Products) graph datasets. We demonstrate that both Single-shot and Multi-shot of IGRP outperform the state-of-the-art unified GNN sparsification (UGS) framework on node classification. The source code can be found in https://github.com/poweiharn/IGRP_GNN.