CoAtGIN: Marrying Convolution and Attention for Graph-based Molecule Property Prediction

Molecule property prediction based on computational strategy plays a key role in the process of drug discovery and design, such as DFT. Yet, these traditional methods are time-consuming and labour-intensive, which can’t satisfy the need of biomedicine. Thanks to the development of deep learning, there are many variants of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) for molecule representation learning. However, whether the existed well-perform graph-based methods have a number of parameters, or the light models can’t achieve good grades on various tasks. In order to manage the trade-off between efficiency and performance, we propose a novel model architecture, CoAtGIN, using both Convolution and Attention. On the local level, k-hop convolution is designed to capture long-range neighbour information. On the global level, besides using the virtual node to pass identical messages, we utilize linear attention to aggregate global graph representation according to the importance of each node and edge. In the recent OGB Large-Scale Benchmark, CoAtGIN achieves the 0.0933 Mean Absolute Error (MAE) on the large-scale dataset PCQM4Mv2 with only 5.6 M model parameters. Moreover, using the linear attention block improves the performance, which helps to capture the global representation.