Graph in Graph Neural Network
Abstract Existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are limited to process graphs each of whose vertices is represented by a vector or a single value, limited their representing capability to describe complex objects. In this paper, we propose a novel GNN (called Graph in Graph Neural (GIG) Network) which can process graph-style data (called GIG sample) whose vertices are further represented by graphs. Given a set of graphs or a data sample whose components can be represented by a set of graphs (called multi-graph data sample), our GIG network starts with a GIG sample generation (GSG) module which encodes the input as a GIG sample , where each GIG vertex includes a graph. Then, a set of GIG hidden layers are stacked, with each consisting of: (1) a GIG vertex-level updating (GVU) module that individually updates the graph in every GIG vertex based on its internal information; and (2) a global-level GIG sample updating (GGU) module that updates graphs in all GIG vertices based on their relationships, making the updated GIG vertices become global context-aware. This way, both internal cues within the graph contained in each GIG vertex and the relationships among GIG vertices could be utilized for down-stream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our GIG network generalizes well for not only various generic graph analysis tasks but also real-world multi-graph data analysis (e.g., human skeleton video-based action recognition), which achieved the new state-of-the-art results on 15 out of 16 evaluated datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wangjs96/Graph-in-Graph-Neural-Network .
Authors
- Jiongshu Wang
- Jing Yang
- Hatice Gunes
- Jiankang Deng
- Siyang Song
Institutions
- University of Exeter (GB)
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Imperial College London (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- International Journal of Computer Vision
- Published
- 2026-03-07
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-026-02731-4
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Graph Neural Networks
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00