Fundamental Concepts in Graph Attention Networks

Abstract

Graph attention networks, also known as GATs, are a specific kind of neural network design that can function on input that is arranged as a graph. These networks make use of masked self-attentional layers in order to compensate for the shortcomings that were present in prior approaches that were based on graph convolutions. The main advantage of GAT is its ability to model the dependencies between nodes in a graph, while also allowing for different weights to be assigned to different edges in the graph. GAT is able to capture both local and global information in a graph. Local information refers to the information surrounding each node, while global information refers to the information about the entire graph. This is achieved through the use of attention mechanisms, which allow the network to selectively focus on certain nodes and edges while ignoring others. It also has scalability, interpretability, flexibility characteristics. This chapter discusses the fundamental concepts in graph attention networks.