Training and Scaling GNNs — The Practical Realities
Graph neural networks look clean on paper and get messy in production, because training on graphs breaks assumptions that ordinary deep learning takes for granted. The data points aren't independent, the graph may not fit in memory, and the model fails in graph-specific ways. This post covers the practical realities of making GNNs actually work at scale — the problems you'll hit and the techniques that address them.
GNNs look clean on paper and get messy in production because the data points aren't independent. Why mini-batching and train/test splitting break on graphs (leakage through edges), how sampling scales GNNs to huge graphs, and the graph-specific failure modes (over-smoothing, over-squashing, homophily) that shape real systems.