Towards Invariance to Node Identifiers in Graph Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Bechler-Speicher, Maya, Eliasof, Moshe, Schonlieb, Carola-Bibiane, Gilad-Bachrach, Ran, Globerson, Amir
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Eliasof, Moshe
Schonlieb, Carola-Bibiane
Gilad-Bachrach, Ran
Globerson, Amir
author_facet Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Eliasof, Moshe
Schonlieb, Carola-Bibiane
Gilad-Bachrach, Ran
Globerson, Amir
contents Message-Passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are known to have limited expressive power, due to their message passing structure. One mechanism for circumventing this limitation is to add unique node identifiers (IDs), which break the symmetries that underlie the expressivity limitation. In this work, we highlight a key limitation of the ID framework, and propose an approach for addressing it. We begin by observing that the final output of the GNN should clearly not depend on the specific IDs used. We then show that in practice this does not hold, and thus the learned network does not possess this desired structural property. Such invariance to node IDs may be enforced in several ways, and we discuss their theoretical properties. We then propose a novel regularization method that effectively enforces ID invariance to the network. Extensive evaluations on both real-world and synthetic tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves ID invariance and, in turn, often boosts generalization performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Invariance to Node Identifiers in Graph Neural Networks
Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Eliasof, Moshe
Schonlieb, Carola-Bibiane
Gilad-Bachrach, Ran
Globerson, Amir
Machine Learning
Message-Passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are known to have limited expressive power, due to their message passing structure. One mechanism for circumventing this limitation is to add unique node identifiers (IDs), which break the symmetries that underlie the expressivity limitation. In this work, we highlight a key limitation of the ID framework, and propose an approach for addressing it. We begin by observing that the final output of the GNN should clearly not depend on the specific IDs used. We then show that in practice this does not hold, and thus the learned network does not possess this desired structural property. Such invariance to node IDs may be enforced in several ways, and we discuss their theoretical properties. We then propose a novel regularization method that effectively enforces ID invariance to the network. Extensive evaluations on both real-world and synthetic tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves ID invariance and, in turn, often boosts generalization performance.
title Towards Invariance to Node Identifiers in Graph Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13660