The Effectiveness of Curvature-Based Rewiring and the Role of Hyperparameters in GNNs Revisited

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Hauptverfasser: Tori, Floriano, Holst, Vincent, Ginis, Vincent
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Tori, Floriano
Holst, Vincent
Ginis, Vincent
author_facet Tori, Floriano
Holst, Vincent
Ginis, Vincent
contents Message passing is the dominant paradigm in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The efficiency of message passing, however, can be limited by the topology of the graph. This happens when information is lost during propagation due to being oversquashed when travelling through bottlenecks. To remedy this, recent efforts have focused on graph rewiring techniques, which disconnect the input graph originating from the data and the computational graph, on which message passing is performed. A prominent approach for this is to use discrete graph curvature measures, of which several variants have been proposed, to identify and rewire around bottlenecks, facilitating information propagation. While oversquashing has been demonstrated in synthetic datasets, in this work we reevaluate the performance gains that curvature-based rewiring brings to real-world datasets. We show that in these datasets, edges selected during the rewiring process are not in line with theoretical criteria identifying bottlenecks. This implies they do not necessarily oversquash information during message passing. Subsequently, we demonstrate that SOTA accuracies on these datasets are outliers originating from sweeps of hyperparameters -- both the ones for training and dedicated ones related to the rewiring algorithm -- instead of consistent performance gains. In conclusion, our analysis nuances the effectiveness of curvature-based rewiring in real-world datasets and brings a new perspective on the methods to evaluate GNN accuracy improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_09381
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Effectiveness of Curvature-Based Rewiring and the Role of Hyperparameters in GNNs Revisited
Tori, Floriano
Holst, Vincent
Ginis, Vincent
Machine Learning
Message passing is the dominant paradigm in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The efficiency of message passing, however, can be limited by the topology of the graph. This happens when information is lost during propagation due to being oversquashed when travelling through bottlenecks. To remedy this, recent efforts have focused on graph rewiring techniques, which disconnect the input graph originating from the data and the computational graph, on which message passing is performed. A prominent approach for this is to use discrete graph curvature measures, of which several variants have been proposed, to identify and rewire around bottlenecks, facilitating information propagation. While oversquashing has been demonstrated in synthetic datasets, in this work we reevaluate the performance gains that curvature-based rewiring brings to real-world datasets. We show that in these datasets, edges selected during the rewiring process are not in line with theoretical criteria identifying bottlenecks. This implies they do not necessarily oversquash information during message passing. Subsequently, we demonstrate that SOTA accuracies on these datasets are outliers originating from sweeps of hyperparameters -- both the ones for training and dedicated ones related to the rewiring algorithm -- instead of consistent performance gains. In conclusion, our analysis nuances the effectiveness of curvature-based rewiring in real-world datasets and brings a new perspective on the methods to evaluate GNN accuracy improvements.
title The Effectiveness of Curvature-Based Rewiring and the Role of Hyperparameters in GNNs Revisited
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09381