Spectral Graph Neural Networks are Incomplete on Graphs with a Simple Spectrum

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Hordan, Snir, Bechler-Speicher, Maya, Lifshitz, Gur, Dym, Nadav
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866908558868611072
author Hordan, Snir
Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Lifshitz, Gur
Dym, Nadav
author_facet Hordan, Snir
Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Lifshitz, Gur
Dym, Nadav
contents Spectral features are widely incorporated within Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to improve their expressive power, or their ability to distinguish among non-isomorphic graphs. One popular example is the usage of graph Laplacian eigenvectors for positional encoding in MPNNs and Graph Transformers. The expressive power of such Spectrally-enhanced GNNs (SGNNs) is usually evaluated via the k-WL graph isomorphism test hierarchy and homomorphism counting. Yet, these frameworks align poorly with the graph spectra, yielding limited insight into SGNNs' expressive power. We leverage a well-studied paradigm of classifying graphs by their largest eigenvalue multiplicity to introduce an expressivity hierarchy for SGNNs. We then prove that many SGNNs are incomplete even on graphs with distinct eigenvalues. To mitigate this deficiency, we adapt rotation equivariant neural networks to the graph spectra setting to propose a method to provably improve SGNNs' expressivity on simple spectrum graphs. We empirically verify our theoretical claims via an image classification experiment on the MNIST Superpixel dataset and eigenvector canonicalization on graphs from ZINC.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05530
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spectral Graph Neural Networks are Incomplete on Graphs with a Simple Spectrum
Hordan, Snir
Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Lifshitz, Gur
Dym, Nadav
Machine Learning
Spectral features are widely incorporated within Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to improve their expressive power, or their ability to distinguish among non-isomorphic graphs. One popular example is the usage of graph Laplacian eigenvectors for positional encoding in MPNNs and Graph Transformers. The expressive power of such Spectrally-enhanced GNNs (SGNNs) is usually evaluated via the k-WL graph isomorphism test hierarchy and homomorphism counting. Yet, these frameworks align poorly with the graph spectra, yielding limited insight into SGNNs' expressive power. We leverage a well-studied paradigm of classifying graphs by their largest eigenvalue multiplicity to introduce an expressivity hierarchy for SGNNs. We then prove that many SGNNs are incomplete even on graphs with distinct eigenvalues. To mitigate this deficiency, we adapt rotation equivariant neural networks to the graph spectra setting to propose a method to provably improve SGNNs' expressivity on simple spectrum graphs. We empirically verify our theoretical claims via an image classification experiment on the MNIST Superpixel dataset and eigenvector canonicalization on graphs from ZINC.
title Spectral Graph Neural Networks are Incomplete on Graphs with a Simple Spectrum
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05530