H$^3$GNNs: Harmonizing Heterophily and Homophily in GNNs via Joint Structural Node Encoding and Self-Supervised Learning

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Hauptverfasser: Xue, Rui, Wu, Tianfu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Xue, Rui
Wu, Tianfu
author_facet Xue, Rui
Wu, Tianfu
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) struggle to balance heterophily and homophily in representation learning, a challenge further amplified in self-supervised settings. We propose H$^3$GNNs, an end-to-end self-supervised learning framework that harmonizes both structural properties through two key innovations: (i) Joint Structural Node Encoding. We embed nodes into a unified space combining linear and non-linear feature projections with K-hop structural representations via a Weighted Graph Convolution Network(WGCN). A cross-attention mechanism enhances awareness and adaptability to heterophily and homophily. (ii) Self-Supervised Learning Using Teacher-Student Predictive Architectures with Node-Difficulty Driven Dynamic Masking Strategies. We use a teacher-student model, the student sees the masked input graph and predicts node features inferred by the teacher that sees the full input graph in the joint encoding space. To enhance learning difficulty, we introduce two novel node-predictive-difficulty-based masking strategies. Experiments on seven benchmarks (four heterophily datasets and three homophily datasets) confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of H$^3$GNNs across diverse graph types. Our H$^3$GNNs achieves overall state-of-the-art performance on the four heterophily datasets, while retaining on-par performance to previous state-of-the-art methods on the three homophily datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11699
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle H$^3$GNNs: Harmonizing Heterophily and Homophily in GNNs via Joint Structural Node Encoding and Self-Supervised Learning
Xue, Rui
Wu, Tianfu
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) struggle to balance heterophily and homophily in representation learning, a challenge further amplified in self-supervised settings. We propose H$^3$GNNs, an end-to-end self-supervised learning framework that harmonizes both structural properties through two key innovations: (i) Joint Structural Node Encoding. We embed nodes into a unified space combining linear and non-linear feature projections with K-hop structural representations via a Weighted Graph Convolution Network(WGCN). A cross-attention mechanism enhances awareness and adaptability to heterophily and homophily. (ii) Self-Supervised Learning Using Teacher-Student Predictive Architectures with Node-Difficulty Driven Dynamic Masking Strategies. We use a teacher-student model, the student sees the masked input graph and predicts node features inferred by the teacher that sees the full input graph in the joint encoding space. To enhance learning difficulty, we introduce two novel node-predictive-difficulty-based masking strategies. Experiments on seven benchmarks (four heterophily datasets and three homophily datasets) confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of H$^3$GNNs across diverse graph types. Our H$^3$GNNs achieves overall state-of-the-art performance on the four heterophily datasets, while retaining on-par performance to previous state-of-the-art methods on the three homophily datasets.
title H$^3$GNNs: Harmonizing Heterophily and Homophily in GNNs via Joint Structural Node Encoding and Self-Supervised Learning
topic Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11699