Meta-path and hypergraph fused distillation framework for heterogeneous information networks embedding

Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs) are crucial in various intelligent systems. The latest advancements in HIN learning aim to combine meta-paths and hypergraphs, capitalizing on their strengths for further success. However, existing methods typically transform meta-paths into hypergraphs by simply removing the original edges from the meta-paths to integrate two semantics. This will inevitably encounter semantic ambiguity, a so-called semantic-shift problem, during the "meta-path → hyperedges" transforming, causing limited improvements. To address this, we introduce a novel fusion framework that distills knowledge from meta-paths into hypergraphs, mitigating such a problem. Specifically, we propose a unique hyperedge extraction method for constructing the hypergraph, incorporating various aspects instead of relying solely on one type of meta-path. Subsequently, we introduce a shallow student model to capture high-order information from the hypergraph, complementing a teacher model that focuses on encoding low-order information from meta-paths. Then, a distillation framework is employed to integrate explicitly multi-order information into the student. Experimental results across diverse datasets demonstrate a substantial improvement in node classification tasks, with an average accuracy increase of 2.1% over existing state-of-the-art methods.