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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cui, Ziyao, Tam, Edric
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11928
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author Cui, Ziyao
Tam, Edric
author_facet Cui, Ziyao
Tam, Edric
contents Graph neural networks (GNNs) are fundamental tools in graph machine learning. The performance of GNNs relies crucially on the availability of informative node features, which can be limited or absent in real-life datasets and applications. A natural remedy is to augment the node features with embeddings computed from eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian matrix. While it is natural to default to Laplacian spectral embeddings, which capture meaningful graph connectivity information, we ask whether spectral embeddings from alternative graph matrices can also provide useful representations for learning. We introduce Interpolated Laplacian Embeddings (ILEs), which are derived from a simple yet expressive family of graph matrices. Using tools from spectral graph theory, we offer a straightforward interpretation of the structural information that ILEs capture. We demonstrate through simulations and experiments on real-world datasets that feature augmentation via ILEs can improve performance across commonly used GNN architectures. Our work offers a straightforward and practical approach that broadens the practitioner's spectral augmentation toolkit when node features are limited.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_11928
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond the Laplacian: Interpolated Spectral Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks
Cui, Ziyao
Tam, Edric
Machine Learning
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are fundamental tools in graph machine learning. The performance of GNNs relies crucially on the availability of informative node features, which can be limited or absent in real-life datasets and applications. A natural remedy is to augment the node features with embeddings computed from eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian matrix. While it is natural to default to Laplacian spectral embeddings, which capture meaningful graph connectivity information, we ask whether spectral embeddings from alternative graph matrices can also provide useful representations for learning. We introduce Interpolated Laplacian Embeddings (ILEs), which are derived from a simple yet expressive family of graph matrices. Using tools from spectral graph theory, we offer a straightforward interpretation of the structural information that ILEs capture. We demonstrate through simulations and experiments on real-world datasets that feature augmentation via ILEs can improve performance across commonly used GNN architectures. Our work offers a straightforward and practical approach that broadens the practitioner's spectral augmentation toolkit when node features are limited.
title Beyond the Laplacian: Interpolated Spectral Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11928