Equivariance Everywhere All At Once: A Recipe for Graph Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Finkelshtein, Ben, Ceylan, İsmail İlkan, Bronstein, Michael, Levie, Ron
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Finkelshtein, Ben
Ceylan, İsmail İlkan
Bronstein, Michael
Levie, Ron
author_facet Finkelshtein, Ben
Ceylan, İsmail İlkan
Bronstein, Michael
Levie, Ron
contents Graph machine learning architectures are typically tailored to specific tasks on specific datasets, which hinders their broader applicability. This has led to a new quest in graph machine learning: how to build graph foundation models capable of generalizing across arbitrary graphs and features? In this work, we present a recipe for designing graph foundation models for node-level tasks from first principles. The key ingredient underpinning our study is a systematic investigation of the symmetries that a graph foundation model must respect. In a nutshell, we argue that label permutation-equivariance alongside feature permutation-invariance are necessary in addition to the common node permutation-equivariance on each local neighborhood of the graph. To this end, we first characterize the space of linear transformations that are equivariant to permutations of nodes and labels, and invariant to permutations of features. We then prove that the resulting network is a universal approximator on multisets that respect the aforementioned symmetries. Our recipe uses such layers on the multiset of features induced by the local neighborhood of the graph to obtain a class of graph foundation models for node property prediction. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on 29 real-world node classification datasets, demonstrating both strong zero-shot empirical performance and consistent improvement as the number of training graphs increases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_14291
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Equivariance Everywhere All At Once: A Recipe for Graph Foundation Models
Finkelshtein, Ben
Ceylan, İsmail İlkan
Bronstein, Michael
Levie, Ron
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Graph machine learning architectures are typically tailored to specific tasks on specific datasets, which hinders their broader applicability. This has led to a new quest in graph machine learning: how to build graph foundation models capable of generalizing across arbitrary graphs and features? In this work, we present a recipe for designing graph foundation models for node-level tasks from first principles. The key ingredient underpinning our study is a systematic investigation of the symmetries that a graph foundation model must respect. In a nutshell, we argue that label permutation-equivariance alongside feature permutation-invariance are necessary in addition to the common node permutation-equivariance on each local neighborhood of the graph. To this end, we first characterize the space of linear transformations that are equivariant to permutations of nodes and labels, and invariant to permutations of features. We then prove that the resulting network is a universal approximator on multisets that respect the aforementioned symmetries. Our recipe uses such layers on the multiset of features induced by the local neighborhood of the graph to obtain a class of graph foundation models for node property prediction. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on 29 real-world node classification datasets, demonstrating both strong zero-shot empirical performance and consistent improvement as the number of training graphs increases.
title Equivariance Everywhere All At Once: A Recipe for Graph Foundation Models
topic Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14291