LightDiC: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Large-scale Digraph Representation Learning

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Abstract

Most existing graph neural networks (GNNs) are limited to undirected graphs, whose restricted scope of the captured relational information hinders their expressive capabilities and deployment. Compared with undirected graphs, directed graphs (digraphs) fit the demand for modeling more complex topological systems by capturing more intricate relationships between nodes. While some directed GNNs have been introduced, their inspiration mainly comes from deep learning architectures, which lead to redundant complexity and computation, making them inapplicable to large-scale databases. To address these issues, we propose LightDiC, a scalable variant of the digraph convolution based on the magnetic Laplacian. Since topology-related computations are conducted solely during offline pre-processing, LightDiC achieves exceptional scalability, enabling downstream predictions to be trained separately without incurring recursive computational costs. Theoretical analysis shows that LightDiC achieves message passing based on the complex field, which corresponds to the proximal gradient descent process of the Dirichlet energy optimization function from the perspective of digraph signal denoising, ensuring its expressiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that LightDiC performs comparably well or even outperforms other SOTA methods in various downstream tasks, with fewer learnable parameters and higher efficiency.