SparsePool: A Graph Pooling Framework via Sparse Representation for Graph Classification

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in graph classification, with graph pooling methods being widely adopted for related tasks. Existing approaches typically rely on node ranking or clustering to coarsen graphs, but often fail to effectively leverage global structural information, leading to loss of critical substructures and limited interpretability-key limitations in molecular analysis and social network mining. To address these issues, we propose SparsePool, a graph pooling method that integrates node features and structural patterns through atomic decomposition. By dynamically decomposing graphs into interpretable atomic units via Boolean matrix factorization, SparsePool preserves semantically meaningful substructures while providing transparent evidence of retained patterns. We further introduce an Atomic Pooling Neural Network (APNN) for graph representation learning. Extensive experiments on relevant benchmarks including biochemical and social network datasets demonstrate that SparsePool outperforms state-of-the-art pooling methods, achieving an average classification accuracy improvement of 1.03% over baseline models while reducing structural information loss. We also discuss its compatibility with emerging quantum computing paradigms, such as quantum-accelerated sparse decomposition, as a promising direction for scaling graph processing in industrial contexts.