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Main Authors: Guan, Weiqi, Shi, Zihao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06782
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author Guan, Weiqi
Shi, Zihao
author_facet Guan, Weiqi
Shi, Zihao
contents While Dirichlet energy serves as a prevalent metric for quantifying over-smoothing, it is inherently restricted to capturing first-order feature derivatives. To address this limitation, we propose a generalized family of node similarity measures based on the energy of higher-order feature derivatives. Through a rigorous theoretical analysis of the relationships among these measures, we establish the decay rates of Dirichlet energy under both continuous heat diffusion and discrete aggregation operators. Furthermore, our analysis reveals an intrinsic connection between the over-smoothing decay rate and the spectral gap of the graph Laplacian. Finally, empirical results demonstrate that attention-based Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) suffer from over-smoothing when evaluated under these proposed metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06782
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Measuring Over-smoothing beyond Dirichlet energy
Guan, Weiqi
Shi, Zihao
Machine Learning
While Dirichlet energy serves as a prevalent metric for quantifying over-smoothing, it is inherently restricted to capturing first-order feature derivatives. To address this limitation, we propose a generalized family of node similarity measures based on the energy of higher-order feature derivatives. Through a rigorous theoretical analysis of the relationships among these measures, we establish the decay rates of Dirichlet energy under both continuous heat diffusion and discrete aggregation operators. Furthermore, our analysis reveals an intrinsic connection between the over-smoothing decay rate and the spectral gap of the graph Laplacian. Finally, empirical results demonstrate that attention-based Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) suffer from over-smoothing when evaluated under these proposed metrics.
title Measuring Over-smoothing beyond Dirichlet energy
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06782