Deeper with Riemannian Geometry: Overcoming Oversmoothing and Oversquashing for Graph Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sun, Li, Huang, Zhenhao, Zhang, Ming, Yu, Philip S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866914104165269504
author Sun, Li
Huang, Zhenhao
Zhang, Ming
Yu, Philip S.
author_facet Sun, Li
Huang, Zhenhao
Zhang, Ming
Yu, Philip S.
contents Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) is the building block of graph foundation models, but fundamentally suffer from oversmoothing and oversquashing. There has recently been a surge of interest in fixing both issues. Existing efforts primarily adopt global approaches, which may be beneficial in some regions but detrimental in others, ultimately leading to the suboptimal expressiveness. In this paper, we begin by revisiting oversquashing through a global measure -- spectral gap $λ$ -- and prove that the increase of $λ$ leads to gradient vanishing with respect to the input features, thereby undermining the effectiveness of message passing. Motivated by such theoretical insights, we propose a \textbf{local} approach that adaptively adjusts message passing based on local structures. To achieve this, we connect local Riemannian geometry with MPNNs, and establish a novel nonhomogeneous boundary condition to address both oversquashing and oversmoothing. Building on the Robin condition, we design a GBN network with local bottleneck adjustment, coupled with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments on homophilic and heterophilic graphs show the expressiveness of GBN. Furthermore, GBN does not exhibit performance degradation even when the network depth exceeds $256$ layers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_17457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deeper with Riemannian Geometry: Overcoming Oversmoothing and Oversquashing for Graph Foundation Models
Sun, Li
Huang, Zhenhao
Zhang, Ming
Yu, Philip S.
Machine Learning
Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) is the building block of graph foundation models, but fundamentally suffer from oversmoothing and oversquashing. There has recently been a surge of interest in fixing both issues. Existing efforts primarily adopt global approaches, which may be beneficial in some regions but detrimental in others, ultimately leading to the suboptimal expressiveness. In this paper, we begin by revisiting oversquashing through a global measure -- spectral gap $λ$ -- and prove that the increase of $λ$ leads to gradient vanishing with respect to the input features, thereby undermining the effectiveness of message passing. Motivated by such theoretical insights, we propose a \textbf{local} approach that adaptively adjusts message passing based on local structures. To achieve this, we connect local Riemannian geometry with MPNNs, and establish a novel nonhomogeneous boundary condition to address both oversquashing and oversmoothing. Building on the Robin condition, we design a GBN network with local bottleneck adjustment, coupled with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments on homophilic and heterophilic graphs show the expressiveness of GBN. Furthermore, GBN does not exhibit performance degradation even when the network depth exceeds $256$ layers.
title Deeper with Riemannian Geometry: Overcoming Oversmoothing and Oversquashing for Graph Foundation Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17457