A Comparison between Recursive Neural Networks and Graph Neural Networks

Recursive neural networks (RNNs) and graph neural networks (GNNs) are two connectionist models that can directly process graphs. RNNs and GNNs exploit a similar processing framework, but they can be applied to different input domains. RNNs require the input graphs to be directed and acyclic, whereas GNNs can process any kind of graphs. The aim of this paper consists in understanding whether such a difference affects the behaviour of the models on a real application. An experimental comparison on an image classification problem is presented, showing that GNNs outperforms RNNs. Moreover the main differences between the models are also discussed w.r.t. their input domains, their approximation capabilities and their learning algorithms.