Advancing Community Detection with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks: Bridging Topological and Attributive Cohesion

Advancing Community Detection with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks: Bridging Topological and Attributive Cohesion

Anjali de Silva, Gang Chen, Hui Ma, Seyed Mohammad Nekooei, Xingquan Zuo

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 7383-7391. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/821

Community detection, a vital technology for real-world applications, uncovers cohesive node groups (communities) by leveraging both topological and attribute similarities in social networks. However, existing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) trained to maximize modularity often converge to suboptimal solutions. Additionally, directly using human-labeled communities for training can undermine topological cohesiveness by grouping disconnected nodes based solely on node attributes. We address these issues by proposing a novel Topological and Attributive Similarity-based Community detection (TAS-Com) method. TAS-Com introduces a novel loss function that exploits the highly effective and scalable Leiden algorithm to detect community structures with global optimal modularity. Leiden is further utilized to refine human-labeled communities to ensure connectivity within each community, enabling TAS-Com to detect community structures with desirable trade-offs between modularity and compliance with human labels. Experimental results on multiple benchmark networks confirm that TAS-Com can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art algorithms.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Web and social networks
Machine Learning: ML: Clustering
Machine Learning: ML: Deep learning architectures
Machine Learning: ML: Supervised Learning