SignGT: Signed Attention-based Graph Transformer for Graph
  Representation Learning
Jinsong Chen Gaichao Li John E. Hopcroft Kun He
The emerging graph Transformers have achieved impressive performance for
graph representation learning over graph neural networks (GNNs). In this work,
we regard the self-attention mechanism, the core module of graph Transformers,
as a two-step aggregation operation on a fully connected graph. Due to the
property of generating positive attention values, the self-attention mechanism
is equal to conducting a smooth operation on all nodes, preserving the
low-frequency information. However, only capturing the low-frequency
information is inefficient in learning complex relations of nodes on diverse
graphs, such as heterophily graphs where the high-frequency information is
crucial. To this end, we propose a Signed Attention-based Graph Transformer
(SignGT) to adaptively capture various frequency information from the graphs.
Specifically, SignGT develops a new signed self-attention mechanism (SignSA)
that produces signed attention values according to the semantic relevance of
node pairs. Hence, the diverse frequency information between different node
pairs could be carefully preserved. Besides, SignGT proposes a structure-aware
feed-forward network (SFFN) that introduces the neighborhood bias to preserve
the local topology information. In this way, SignGT could learn informative
node representations from both long-range dependencies and local topology
information. Extensive empirical results on both node-level and graph-level
tasks indicate the superiority of SignGT against state-of-the-art graph
Transformers as well as advanced GNNs.