Graph Attention Networks — Learning Which Neighbors Matter
The graph convolutional network treats all of a node's neighbors as (near) equals. But that's often wrong — some neighbors are far more relevant than others, and which ones depends on the context. Graph attention networks fix this by letting the model learn how much to weigh each neighbor, bringing the attention mechanism that revolutionized language models to graphs. This post explains attention on graphs and why it's so often the right upgrade over plain averaging.
The GCN treats all neighbors as equal, but some matter far more and which ones is context-dependent. Graph attention networks learn data-dependent weights so a node listens more to important neighbors — the transformer's attention mechanism adapted to graphs — with interpretability as a bonus. When it helps and the honest trade-offs.