Asynchronous Nonlinear Updates on Graphs

The notion of graph shift, introduced recently in graph signal processing, extends many classical signal processing techniques to graphs. Its practical importance follows from its localization: a single graph shift requires nodes to communicate only with their neighbors. However, communications should happen simultaneously, which requires a synchronization over the graph. In order to overcome this restriction, recent studies consider a random asynchronous variant of the graph shift, which is also suitable for autonomous networks. A graph signal under this randomized scheme is shown to converge (under mild conditions) to an eigenvector of the eigenvalue 1 of the operator even if the operator has other eigenvalues with magnitudes larger than unity. If the eigenvalue 1 does not exist, the operator can be easily normalized in theory. However, in practice, the normalization requires one to know the (dominant) eigenvalues, which may not be possible to obtain in large autonomous networks. To eliminate this limitation, this study considers the use of a nonlinearity in the updates making the scheme similar in spirit to the Hopfield neural network model. Our simulation results show that a graph signal still approaches the eigenvector of the dominant eigenvalue although the convergence is not exact. Nevertheless, approximation is sufficient to accomplish certain tasks including autonomous clustering.