Graph Learning with Multiplicative Aggregation for Solar Filament Fragment Association Modeling in Full-disk H α Images

Abstract

Abstract Solar filaments are prominent features in H α observations. During their evolution, they often exhibit complex morphological and topological changes, which, due to line-of-sight projection effects, appear as fragmentation and merging. These phenomena make it difficult to reliably track solar filaments using automated methods, as the same structure may appear different over time. To address this issue, we formulate filament fragment association as a graph-based learning problem, where individual fragments are represented as nodes and candidate pairwise relationships are modeled as edges to infer whether fragments belong to the same filament. Furthermore, we propose a novel graph neural network (GNN) that incorporates multiplicative aggregation layers to enhance feature aggregation in the graph, replacing conventional additive aggregation with a multiplicative mechanism to better capture information between fragments. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves reliable performance in filament fragment association, validating the effectiveness of the graph-based formulation and the proposed multiplicative aggregation mechanism.