Walking With Attention: Self-Guided Walking for Heterogeneous Graph Embedding

Heterogeneous graph embedding aims at learning low-dimensional representations from a graph featuring nodes and edges of diverse natures, and meanwhile preserving the underlying topology. Existing approaches along this line have largely relied on
meta-paths
, which are by nature hand-crafted and pre-defined transition rules, so as to explore the semantics of a graph. Despite the promising results, defining meta-paths requires domain knowledge, and thus when the test distribution deviates from the priors, such methods are prone to errors. In this paper, we propose a self-learning scheme for heterogeneous graph embedding, termed as self-guided walk (SILK), that bypasses meta-paths and learns adaptive attentions for node walking. SILK assumes no prior knowledge or annotation is provided, and conducts a customized random walk to encode the contexts of the heterogeneous graph of interest. Specifically, this is achieved via maintaining a dynamically-updated
guidance matrix
that records the node-conditioned transition potentials. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that SILK significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.