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Cluster Attention for Graph Machine Learning

Machine Learning 2026-04-10 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Message Passing Neural Networks have recently become the most popular approach to graph machine learning tasks; however, their receptive field is limited by the number of message passing layers. To increase the receptive field, Graph Transformers with global attention have been proposed; however, global attention does not take into account the graph topology and thus lacks graph-structure-based inductive biases, which are typically very important for graph machine learning tasks. In this work, we propose an alternative approach: cluster attention (CLATT). We divide graph nodes into clusters with off-the-shelf graph community detection algorithms and let each node attend to all other nodes in each cluster. CLATT provides large receptive fields while still having strong graph-structure-based inductive biases. We show that augmenting Message Passing Neural Networks or Graph Transformers with CLATT significantly improves their performance on a wide range of graph datasets including datasets from the recently introduced GraphLand benchmark representing real-world applications of graph machine learning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.07492,
  title  = {Cluster Attention for Graph Machine Learning},
  author = {Oleg Platonov and Liudmila Prokhorenkova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.07492},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:59:57.441Z