Fast Network Alignment via Graph Meta-Learning

Network alignment (NA) – i.e., linking entities from different networks (also known as identity linkage) – is a fundamental problem in many application domains. Recent advances in deep graph learning have inspired various auspicious approaches for tackling the NA problem. However, most of the existing works suffer from efficiency and generalization, due to complexities and redundant computations.We approach the NA from a different perspective, tackling it via meta-learning in a semi-supervised manner, and propose an effective and efficient approach called Meta-NA – a novel, conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework. Specifically, we reformulate NA as a one-shot classification problem and address it with a graph meta-learning framework. Meta-NA exploits the meta-metric learning from known anchor nodes to obtain latent priors for linking unknown anchor nodes. It contains multiple sub-networks corresponding to multiple graphs, learning a unified metric space, where one can easily link entities across different graphs. In addition to the performance lift, Meta-NA greatly improves the anchor linking generalization, significantly reduces the computational overheads, and is easily extendable to multi-network alignment scenarios. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of Meta-NA over several state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both alignment accuracy and learning efficiency.