Locally-adaptive mapping for network alignment via meta-learning

Abstract

Network alignment (NA), discovering anchor nodes that represent the same entities across different networks, plays a fundamental role in information fusion. Most existing embedding-based methods rarely study the alignment module, which learns a global mapping to unify embedding spaces. However, global mapping is a holistic solution for nodes, incapable of optimally projecting each node, thus deteriorating alignment accuracy. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a local mapping framework named MANA, which fine-tunes global mapping by meta-learning to obtain node-level local mappings. One advantage of MANA is that it tailors local mapping adapted to the embedded locality of each node while maintaining the general knowledge of global mapping. The main challenge of applying meta-learning to network alignment is paradigm incompatibility; that is, how to construct effective meta-tasks and support sets for zero-shot NA. Therefore, the paper constructs meta-tasks with similarity-based support sets. A support set is taken from pairs of anchor nodes, the source nodes of which are embedded close to the query node. Our framework can be applied to existing mapping-based NA models. Experimental results show that mapping-based models with MANA improve evaluation scores by 1%–59% relative to their original models, demonstrating the effectiveness of local mapping. Some simple mapping-based models improved by MANA even outperform sophisticated sharing-based NA approaches.