Organizations: College of Computer, Qinghai Normal University, Xining, 810001, Qinghai, China · College of Computer, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, Jiangsu, China · College of Computer, Qinghai Minzu University, Xining, 810007, Qinghai, China
This work investigates large-scale sketch recognition from a graph-native perspective, where free-hand sketches are directly modeled as structured graphs rather than raster images or stroke sequences. We propose SketchGraphNet, a hybrid graph neural architecture that integrates local message passing with a memory-efficient global attention mechanism, without relying on auxiliary positional or structural encodings. To support systematic evaluation, we construct SketchGraph, a large-scale benchmark comprising 3.44 million graph-structured sketches across 344 categories, with two variants (A and R) to reflect different noise conditions. Each sketch is represented as a spatiotemporal graph with normalized stroke-order attributes. On SketchGraph-A and SketchGraph-R, SketchGraphNet achieves Top-1 accuracies of 83.62% and 87.61%, respectively, under a unified training configuration. MemEffAttn further reduces peak GPU memory by over 40% and training time by more than 30% compared with Performer-based global attention, while maintaining comparable accuracy.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Architecture of SketchGraphNet.
Figure 2: Architecture of MemEffAttn.
Figure 3: Statistical Comparison Between the A and R Versions of the SketchGraph Dataset: (a) Path-Length Distributions Across Categories; (b) Category-Level Density in the Space of Stroke Count Versus Path Length.
Figure 4: Structural Statistics Aggregated Across All Categories in the Dataset.
Figure 5: Mutually Exclusive Visualization of A − R and R Samples in the SketchGraph Dataset.
Models
Param (M)
Train time
Latency (ms)
DSSG
SketchGraph-A
SketchGraph-R
TOP-1
TOP-3
TOP-5
TOP-1
TOP-3
TOP-5
S3Net
5.33
1.410 h
4.206
w/o
0.8024
0.9246
0.9465
0.8496
0.9640
0.9804
1.405 h
4.237
w/
0.8070
0.9272
0.9486
0.8544
0.9663
0.9820
SketchGNN
0.79
1.047 h
5.208
w/o
0.6936
0.8551
0.8934
0.7457
0.9076
0.9425
1.058 h
5.132
w/
0.6986
0.8582
0.8964
0.7511
0.9105
0.9447
MGT
39.98
6.251 h
6.086
w/o
0.7029
0.8625
0.9009
0.7571
0.9164
0.9495
Table 1: Classification Accuracy on Both Dataset Versions.
Figure 6: Training Accuracy and Loss Curves.
Figure 7: Confusion Matrices for Best and Worst Performing Categories.
Figure 8: Visualization of Easily Confused Categories.
Global Attention
Conv Blocks
Avg. Memory
Avg. Train Time
Top1 Accuracy
SketchGraph-A
SketchGraph-R
PerformerAttention
4
5.03 GB
2.12 h
0.8344
0.8756
6
6.44 GB
3.03 h
0.8404
0.8804
8
7.93 GB
3.93 h
0.8423
0.8823
MemEffAttn
4
2.87 GB
1.38 h
0.8362
0.8761
6
3.60 GB
1.93 h
0.8414
0.8813
Table 2: Evaluation of ConvBlock Count and Global Attention Methods.
Local GNN
DSSG
TOP-1 Accuracy
SketchGraph-A
SketchGraph-R
GINConv
w/o
0.8313
0.8731
w/
0.8362
0.8761
DenseSAGEConv
w/o
0.8312
0.8709
w/
0.8337
0.8753
SAGEConv
w/o
0.8302
0.8725
Table 3: Evaluation of Local GNN Operator Replaceability.
Configuration
TOP-1 Accuracy
SketchGraph-A
SketchGraph-R
Full SketchGraphNet
0.8362
0.8761
w/o Global Attention
0.7589
0.8048
w/o Temporal Feature
0.8171
0.8632
Table 4: Ablation Study on Global Attention Structures.
MemEffAttn
Number of ConvBlock
TOP-1 Accuracy
SketchGraph-A
SketchGraph-R
w/ Kernel
4
0.8362
0.8761
6
0.8419
0.8815
8
0.8432
0.8822
w/o Kernel
4
0.8376
0.8773
6
0.8430
0.8584
Table 5: Ablation Study on Nonlinear-Kernels.
Attention Implementation
Implementation Type
Peak Memory
Convergence Status
First NaN Epoch
Standard Attention
Explicit NN Matrix
4.07 GB
Failed
1
MemEffAttn
Tiling-based (xFormers)
2.87 GB
Stable
None
Table 6: Stability analysis under identical ReLU-kernel mapping.
SketchGraphNet
TOP-1 Accuracy
SketchGraph-A
SketchGraph-R
Default settings
0.8362
0.8761
Learning Rate (0.0001)
0.8136
0.8575
Label Smoothing (0.0)
0.8317
0.8741
DropOut (0.2)
0.8291
0.8698
Table 7: Parameter Sensitivity Analysis of SketchGraphNet.
Existing vector-sketch models treat recognition and generation as separate tasks, leaving a gap for streaming interfaces that must understand a drawing as it is being made. We present SketchMamba, a single causal sequence model that continuously classifies a sketch from any partial prefix while simultaneously generating its continuation. We achieve this by applying a dense per-step classification loss to a selective state-space backbone. Evaluated on a 58-class subset of the Quick, Draw! dataset, SketchMamba yields 94.93% final-step accuracy and a progressive-accuracy Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.706, crossing 90% of its final accuracy by the time 70% of the strokes are drawn. In a matched-budget comparison, the 1.55 million-parameter backbone ties a causal Transformer while outperforming recurrent and convolutional baselines. Ablations confirm that the dense supervision regime, rather than the architecture alone, drives the early-prediction capability. The results demonstrate that a single causal hidden state can unify progressive recognition and autoregressive generation without auxiliary encoders or task-specific branching.
Kavish Jhaveri, Arya Shah
The National High School, Ahmedabad, India · Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India
Sketch-based 3D shape retrieval (SBSR) aims to retrieve 3D shapes that are consistent with the category of the input hand-drawn sketch. The core challenge of this task lies in two aspects: existing methods typically employ simplified aggregation strategies for independently encoded 3D multi-view features, which ignore the geometric relationships between views and multi-level details, resulting in weak 3D representation. Simultaneously, traditional SBSR methods are constrained by visible category limitations, leading to poor performance in zero-shot scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Multi-View Hierarchical Graph Neural Network (MV-HGNN), a novel framework for SBSR. Specifically, we construct a view-level graph and capture adjacent geometric dependencies and cross-view message passing via local graph convolution and global attention. A view selector is further introduced to perform hierarchical graph coarsening, enabling a progressively larger receptive field for graph convolution and mitigating the interference of redundant views, which leads to more discriminate discriminative hierarchical 3D representation. To enable category agnostic alignment and mitigate overfitting to seen classes, we leverage CLIP text embeddings as semantic prototypes and project both sketch and 3D features into a shared semantic space. We use a two-stage training strategy for category-level retrieval and a one-stage strategy for zero-shot retrieval under the same model architecture. Under both category-level and zero-shot settings, extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that MV-HGNN outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Hang Cheng, Muyan He, Mingyu Fan +3
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China · Control and Simulation Center, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang
Graph neural networks typically rely on dense, floating-point node representations, which can impose substantial memory and computational costs. Binary graph hashing offers an alternative by encoding node information as compact bit strings. However, existing approaches either sacrifice global topological information for computational efficiency or incur substantial generation costs. We introduce an ultra-fast, entirely algebraic hashing method that constructs binary node representations directly from graph structure, without requiring node features or gradient-based training. Our method approximates a high-order structural transition matrix using randomized column sampling inspired by the Nyström method and combines it with an efficient label-safe semantic propagation mechanism. The resulting continuous representations are discretized through column-wise thresholding to obtain compact binary codes. Experiments on ten node classification datasets show that the proposed method consistently improves classification accuracy over existing feature-free binary baselines while requiring sub-second code generation on many datasets. The resulting binary representations are also naturally suited to event-driven computation, making them compatible with neuromorphic spiking neural networks and gradient-free learning rules. These results demonstrate that simple algebraic approximations can provide an efficient alternative to learned pipelines for discrete graph representation learning.
Srajan Agarwal, Megha P, Bikas C Das +2
School of Data Science, IISER Thiruvananthapuram, India · Department of Physical Sciences, IISER Berhampur, India